Writing and Difference (Routledge Classics)

Writ ing and Diff erence

Jacques

Derrida Writing and Diff erence

Translated, with an introduction and additional notes, by Alan Bass

London and New York

First published 1967 by Éditions du Seuil This translation first published in Great Britain 1978 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd First published in Routledge Classics 2001 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

Translation © 1978 The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-203-99178-8

Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0–415–25537–6 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–25383–7 (pbk)

Le tout sans nouveauté qu’un espacement de la lecture Mallarmé, Preface to Un coup de dés

C ONTENTS

Translator’s Introduction

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Force and Signification Cogito and the History of Madness Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas ‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology La parole soufflée Freud and the Scene of Writing The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences Ellipsis

Notes Sources

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1 36 77 97 193 212 246 292 317 351 371 378 445

T RANSLATOR’S I NTRODUCTION

“Par la date de ces textes, nous voudrions marquer qu’à l’instant, pour les relier, de les relire, nous ne pouvons nous tenir à égale distance de chacun d’eux. Ce qui reste ici le déplacement d’une question forme certes un système. Par quelque couture interprétative, nous aurions su après-coup le dessiner. Nous n’en avons rien laissé paraître que le pointillé, y ménageant ou y abandonnant ces blancs sans lesquels aucun texte jamais ne se propose comme tel. Si texte veut dire tissu, tous ces essais en ont obstinément defini la couture comme faufilure. (Décembre 1966.)” This note originally appeared appended to the bibliography of L’écriture et la différence, a collection of Derrida’s essays written between 1959 and 1967 and published as a volume in the latter year. A glance at the list of sources (p. 445 below) will show that although Derrida has arranged the essays in order of their original publication, the essay that occupies the approximate middle of the volume was actually written in 1959, and therefore precedes the others. Before translating the note—in fact one of the most difficult passages in the book to translate—let us look at what Derrida said about the chronology of his works up to 1967 in an interview with Henri Ronse published in Lettres françaises, 12 December 1967 and entitled “Implications.” (This interview, along with two others, has been collected in a small volume entitled Positions, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972.) Hopefully this discussion of chronology

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will serve to orient the reading of Writing and Difference, and to clarify why the essay that is in many respects the first one—“‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology”—occupies the middle of the volume. The year 1967 marks Derrida’s emergence as a major figure in contemporary French thought. La voix et le phénomène (translated by David Allison as Speech and Phenomena, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), a work devoted to analyzing Husserl’s ideas about the sign, and De la grammatologie (translated by Gayatri Spivak as Of Grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), devoted mainly to Rousseau’s “Essay on the Origin on Languages” seen in the light of the history of the idea of the sign, both appeared in 1967, along with L’écriture et la différence. In response to Ronse’s question about how to read these three books published one on the heels of the other, Derrida first says that De la grammatologie can be considered a bipartite work in the middle of which one could insert L’écriture et la différence. By implication, this would make the first half of De la grammatologie—in which Derrida demonstrates the system of ideas which from ancient to modern times has regulated the notion of the sign—the preface to L’écriture et la différence. It would be useful to keep this in mind while reading L’écriture et la différence, for while there are many references throughout the essays to the history of the notion of the sign, these references are nowhere in this volume as fully explicated as they are in the first half of De la grammatologie. Derrida explicitly states that the insertion of L’écriture et la différence into De la grammatologie would make the second half of the latter, devoted to Rousseau, the twelfth essay of L’écriture et la différence. Inversely, Derrida goes on to say, De la grammatologie can be inserted into the middle of L’écriture et la différence, for the first six essays collected in the latter work preceded en fait et en droit (de facto and de juare—a favorite expression of Derrida’s) the publication, in two issues of Critique (December 1965 and January 1966), of the long essay which was further elaborated into the first part of De la grammatologie—our preface by implication to L’écriture et la différence. The last five essays of L’écriture et la différence, Derrida states, are situated or engaged in “l’ouverture grammatologique,” the grammatological opening (Positions, p. 12). According to Derrida’s statements a bit later in the interview, this “grammatological opening,” whose theoretical matrix is elaborated in the first half of De la grammatologie—which, to restate, systematizes the

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ideas about the sign, writing and metaphysics which are scattered throughout L’écriture et la différence—can be defined as the “deconstruction” of philosophy by examining in the most faithful, rigorous way the “structured genealogy” of all of philosophy’s concepts; and to do so in order to determine what issues the history of philosophy has hidden, forbidden, or repressed. The first step of this deconstruction of philosophy, which attempts to locate that which is present nowhere in philosophy. i.e., that which philosophy must hide in order to remain philosophy, is precisely the examination of the notion of presence as undertaken by Heidegger. Heidegger, says Derrida, recognized in the notion of presence the “destiny of philosophy,” and the reference to the Heideggerean deconstruction of presence is a constant throughout Derrida’s works. (Indeed, the reader unfamiliar with Heidegger may well be mystified by Derrida’s frequent references to the notion of presence as the central target in the deconstruction of philosophy.) The grammatological (from the Greek gramma meaning letter or writing) opening consists in the examination of the treatment of writing by philosophy, as a “particularly revelatory symptom” (Positions, p. 15) both of how the notion of presence functions in philosophy and of what this notion serves to repress. Derrida arrived at this position through a close scrutiny of the philosophical genealogy of linguistics, especially the philosophical treatment of the sign. From Plato to Heidegger himself, Derrida demonstrates, there is a persistent exclusion of the notion of writing from the philosophical definition of the sign. Since this exclusion can always be shown to be made in the name of presence—the sign allegedly being most present in spoken discourse— Derrida uses it as a “symptom” which reveals the workings of the “repressive” logic of presence, which determines Western philosophy as such. Derrida’s division of L’écriture et la différence into two parts, then, serves to remind the reader that between the sixth and seventh essays a “theoretical matrix” was elaborated whose principles are to some extent derived from the first six essays and are more systematically put to work in the last five. However, I would like to propose another division of the book, a division between the fifth (“‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology”) and sixth essays. My reason for placing the division at this point stems from what Derrida says about La voix et le phénomène,

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the other work published in 1967; like this latter work “‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology” is devoted to Husserl. In a “classical philosophical architecture,” Derrida says of the three books published in 1967, La voix et le phénomène would have to be read first, for in it is posed, at a point which he calls “decisive,” the “question of the voice and of phonetic writing in its relationships to the entire history of the West, such as it may be represented in the history of metaphysics, and in the most modern, critical and vigilant form of metaphysics: Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology” (Positions, p. 13). Thus La voix et le phénomène could be bound to either De la grammatologie or L’écriture et la différence, Derrida says, as a long note. Where would it be appended to L’écriture et la différence? In the same paragraph of the interview Derrida refers to another of his essays on Husserl, his introduction to his own translation of Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry, published in 1962. He says that the introduction to The Origin of Geometry is the counterpart of La voix et le phénomène, for the “problematic of writing was already in place [in the former], as such, and bound to the irreducible structure of [the verb]‘différer’ [to differ and to defer, or, grossly put, difference in space and in time] in its relationships to consciousness, presence, science, history and the history of science, the disappearance or deferral of the origin, etc.” (p. 13). Derrida might have said that this problematic was already in place in 1959, for a passage from “‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology” poses the question of writing, again in relation to The Origin of Geometry, in the same terms employed in the 1967 interview, i.e., in terms of writing and difference: “Reason, Husserl says, is the logos which is produced in history. It traverses Being with itself in sight, in order to appear to itself, that is, to state itself and hear itself as logos . . . . It emerges from itself in order to take hold of itself within itself, in the ‘living present’ of its selfpresence. In emerging from itself, [logos as] hearing oneself speak constitutes itself as the history of reason through the detour of writing. Thus it differs from itself in order to reappropriate itself. The Origin of Geometry describes the necessity of this exposition of reason in a worldly inscription. An exposition indispensable to the constitution of truth . . . but which is also the danger to meaning from what is outside the sign [i.e., is neither the acoustic material used as the signifier, nor the signified concept the sign refers to]. In the moment of writing, the sign can

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always ‘empty’ itself . . . .” If La voix et le phénomène, then, is the counterpart to the introduction to The Origin of Geometry, and if it can be attached to L’écriture et la différence as a long note, it seems that this would be the place to do so, for here the general conditions for a deconstruction of metaphysics based on the notions of writing and difference, and first arrived at through a reading of how the notion of the sign functions in Husserlian phenomenology, are explicitly stated. This would make La voix et le phénomène the sixth essay of a hypothetical twelve in L’écriture et la différence, but in the form of a long footnote attached to the middle of the volume. Chronologically, of course, Derrida’s division of L’écriture et la différence is more reasonable than the one I am proposing. I offer this division, again, to help orient the reader who comes to Writing and Difference knowing only that Derrida is very difficult to read. Indeed, without some foreknowledge of (1) the attempt already begun by Derrida in 1959, but not presented until approximately the middle of this volume, to expand the deconstruction of metaphysics via a reading of Husserl’s treatment of the sign; a reading which always pushes toward a moment of irreducible difference conceived not only as the danger to the doctrines of truth and meaning which are governed by presence, but also as an inevitable danger in the form of writing which allows truth and meaning to present themselves; and (2) the constant reference to Heidegger’s analyses of the notion of presence, the first five essays of Writing and Difference might be incomprehensible. This is not to gainsay Derrida’s statement that the last five essays only are “engaged in the grammatological opening.” These last five essays do follow Derrida’s original publication (in Critique) of a systematic theoretical matrix for a deconstruction of metaphysics along the lines first laid out in the analyses of Husserl; this is why La voix et le phénomène comes first. Therefore, without setting aside the specific, individual contents of the first five essays, one must also be alerted to their developing systematicity, a systematicity whose guiding thread is embedded in the passage just cited from “‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology.” The best way to follow this thread is to pay close attention to Derrida’s demonstrations—less and less elliptical as one continues through Writing and Difference—of how philosophically “traditional” some of the most “modern” concepts of criticism and philosophy are, for example in the

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xiv translator’s introduction references to Kant and Leibniz in the analysis of literary formalism in the first essay, “Force and Signification.” The conclusion of this brief discussion of chronology with the metaphor of following a thread through a text brings us to the translation of the note originally appended to the list of sources in L’écriture et la différence. The translation is impossible without commentary, which will be placed in brackets: “By means of the dates of these texts, we would like to indicate [marquer: to mark] that in order to bind them together [relier: to put between covers the pages forming a work, originally by sewing], in rereading them [relire: relier and relire are anagrams], we cannot maintain an equal distance from each of them. What remains here the displacement of a question certainly forms a system. With some interpretive sewing [couture] we could have sketched this system afterward [après-coup; in German nachträglich. Cf. “Freud and the Scene of Writing” for the analysis of this notion.] We have only permitted isolated points [le pointillé: originally a means of engraving by points] of the system to appear, deploying or abandoning in it those blank spaces [blancs: Derrida’s analysis of Mallarmé, which was to be written in 1969, focuses on the role of the blanc in the text; see also the epigraph to this volume which refers to Mallarmé’s notion of espacement: “the whole without novelty except a spacing of reading.” For the analysis of the blanc and espacement see “La double séance” in La dissémination, Paris: Seuil, 1972] without which no text is proposed as such. If text [texte] means cloth (tissu), the word texte, is derived from the Latin textus, meaning cloth (tissu), and from texere, to weave (tisser); in English we have text and textile. Derrida comments on this derivation at the outset of La pharmacie de Platon also in La dissémination.], all these essays have obstinately defined sewing [couture] as basting [faufilure: the faux, “false,” in fau-filure, or “false stringing,” is actually an alteration of the earlier form of the word, farfiler or fourfiler, from the Latin fors, meaning outside. Thus basting is sewing on the outside which does not bind the textile tightly.] (December 1966.)” The essays of Writing and Difference, then, are less “bound” than “basted” together. In turn, each essay is “basted” to the material of the other texts it analyzes, for, as he has stated, Derrida’s writing is “entirely consumed in the reading of other texts.” If one reads Writing and Difference only in order to extract from it a system of deconstruction—

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which has been our focus so far—one would overlook the persistent import of Writing and Difference. To repeat Derrida’s terms, these essays always affirm that the “texture” of texts makes any assemblage of them a “basted” one, i.e., permits only the kind of fore-sewing that emphasizes the necessary spaces between even the finest stitching. In practical terms, I would suggest a “basted,” well-spaced reading of Writing and Difference. Instead of reading through the book as a unified, well-sewn volume, one could follow both its arguments and its design in a way that would make them more comprehensible by choosing any of the essays to start with, and by reading the major works it refers to. (I have provided all possible references to English translations of the works in question.) Derrida is difficult to read not only by virtue of his style, but also because he seriously wishes to challenge the ideas that govern the way we read. His texts are more easily grasped if we read them in the way he implicitly suggests—which is not always the way we are used to reading. The question arises—and it is a serious one—whether these essays can be read in a language other than French. It is no exaggeration to say that most of the crucial passages of L’écriture et la différence require the same kind of commentary as was just given for a bibliographical note. Some of the difficulties can be resolved by warning the reader that Derrida often refers back to his own works, and anticipates others, without explicitly saying so; some of these instances have been annotated. This difficulty, however, is compounded by frequent use of the terminology of classical philosophy, again without explicit explanation or reference. I will indicate below some of the terms that appear most frequently in Writing and Difference; throughout the text I have annotated translations that presented problems for specific essays, and have also provided some references not provided by Derrida to works under discussion without specifically being cited. More important, however, are the general issues raised by the question of translatability. Derrida always writes with close attention to the resonances and punning humor of etymology. Occasionally, when the Greek and Latin inheritances of English and French coincide, this aspect of Derrida’s style can be captured; more often it requires the kind of laborious annotation (impossible in a volume of this size) provided above. The translator, constantly aware of what he is sacrificing, is often tempted to use a language that

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xvi translator’s introduction is a compromise between English as we know it and English as he would like it to be in order to capture as much of the original text as possible. This compromise English, however, is usually comprehensible only to those who read the translation along with the original. Moreover, despite Derrida’s often dense and elliptical style, he certainly does not write a compromise French. It has been my experience that however syntactically complex or lexically rich, there is no sentence in this book that is not perfectly comprehensible in French—with patience. Therefore, I have chosen to try to translate into English as we know it. Sometimes this has meant breaking up and rearranging some very long sentences. At other times it has been possible to respect the original syntax and to maintain some very long, complex sentences. Some etymological word play has been lost, some has been annotated, and some translated. These empirical difficulties of translation are, of course, tied to the question of the sign itself. Can any translation be made to signify the same thing as the original text? How crucial is the play of the signifiers—etymological play, stylistic play—to what is signified by the text? Derrida has addressed himself to this question in the second interview in Positions (entitled “Semiologie et Grammatologie”). The crux of the question is the inherited concept that the sign consists of a signifier and a signified, that is, of a sensible (i.e., relating to the senses, most often hearing) part which is the vehicle to its intelligible part (its meaning). Derrida states that the history of metaphysics has never ceased to impose upon semiology (the science of signs) the search for a “transcendental signified,” that is, a concept independent of language (p. 30). However, even if the inherited opposition between signifier and signified can be shown to be programmed by the metaphysical desire for a transcendental, other-worldly meaning (that is often derived from the theological model of the presence of God), this does not mean that the opposition between signifier and signified can simply be abandoned as an historical delusion. Derrida states: “That this opposition or difference cannot be radical and absolute does not prevent it from functioning, and even from being indispensable within certain limits—very wide limits. For example, no translation would be possible without it. And in fact the theme of a transcendental signified was constituted within the horizon of an absolutely pure, transparent

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and unequivocal translatability. Within the limits to which it is possible, or at least appears possible, translation practices the difference between signified and signifier. But if this difference is never pure, translation is no more so; and for the notion of translation we would have to substitute a notion of transformation: a regulated transformation of one language by another, of one text by another. We will never have, and in fact have never had, any ‘transfer’ of pure signifieds—from one language to another, or within one language—which would be left virgin and intact by the signifying instrument or ‘vehicle’ ” (Positions, p. 31). The translator, then, must be sure that he has understood the syntax and lexicon of the original text in order to let his own language carry out the work of transformation. Again, this is best facilitated by obeying the strictures of his language, for a precipitate bending of it into unaccustomed forms may be indicative more of his own miscomprehension than of difficulties in the original text. In this respect, the translator’s position is analogous to that of the psychoanalyst who attempts to translate the manifest language of dreams into a latent language. To do so, the analyst must first be sure that he has understood the manifest language. As Derrida says in note 3 of “Cogito and the History of Madness,” “The latent content of a dream (and of any conduct or consciousness in general) communicates with the manifest content only through the unity of a language; a language which the analyst, then, must speak as well as possible.” The discussion of terms offered below, and the translator’s footnotes in the text, are an attempt to provide a guide to the “manifest” language of Writing and Difference. Like the analyst, however, the reader must let his attention float, and be satisfied with a partial understanding of a given essay on any particular reading. As the manifest language begins to become more familiar, the persistence of the “latent” content—what Derrida has called “the unconscious of philosophical opposition” (Positions, p. 60, note 6; my italics)—will become a surer guide, a more salient thread in the weave of these texts. Derrida’s terms. Wherever Derrida uses différance as a neologism I have left it untranslated. Its meanings are too multiple to be explained here fully, but we may note briefly that the word combines in neither the active nor the passive voice the coincidence of meanings in the verb différer: to

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xviii translator’s introduction differ (in space) and to defer (to put off in time, to postpone presence). Thus, it does not function simply either as différence (difference) or as différance in the usual sense (deferral), and plays on both meanings at once. Derrida’s 1968 lecture “La différance” (reprinted in Marges, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972) is indispensable here. Throughout Writing and Difference Derrida links the concept of différance to his play on the words totalitarian and solicitation. He sees structuralism as a form of philosophical totalitarianism, i.e., as an attempt to account for the totality of a phenomenon by reduction of it to a formula that governs it totally. Derrida submits the violent, totalitarian structural project to the counterviolence of solicitation, which derives from the Latin sollicitare, meaning to shake the totality (from sollus, “all,” and ciere, “to move, to shake”), Every totality, he shows, can be totally shaken, that is, can be shown to be founded on that which it excludes, that which would be in excess for a reductive analysis of any kind. (The English solicit should be read in this etymological sense wherever it appears.) This etymological metaphor covering a philosophical-political violence is also implied in the notion of archia (archie in French; also a neologism). Archia derives from the Greek arche¯, which combines the senses of a founding, original principle and of a government by one controlling principle. (Hence, for example, the etymological link between archeology and monarchy.) Philosophy is founded on the principle of the archia, on regulation by true, original principles; the deconstruction of philosophy reveals the differential excess which makes the archia possible. This excess is often posed as an aporia, the Greek word for a seemingly insoluble logical difficulty: once a system has been “shaken” by following its totalizing logic to its final consequences, one finds an excess which cannot be construed within the rules of logic, for the excess can only be conceived as neither this nor that, or both at the same time—a departure from all rules of logic. Différance often functions as an aporia: it is difference in neither time nor space and makes both possible. Ousia and parousia are the Greek words for being governed by presence; parousia also contains the sense of reappropriation of presence in a second coming of Christ. Epekeina tes ousias is the Platonic term for the beyond of being; Derrida has often used this concept as a steppingstone in his deconstructions. Signified and signifier have been explained

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above. Derrida also consistently plays on the derivation of sens (meaning or sense; Sinn in German) which includes both a supposedly intelligible, rational sense (a signified meaning) and a vehicle dependent on the senses for its expression (the signifier). Further, in French sens also means direction; to lose meaning is to lose direction, to be lost, to feel that one is in a labyrinth. I have inflected the translation of sens to conform to its play of meanings wherever possible. Heidegger’s terms. While the concept of Being belongs to the entire metaphysical tradition, its translation into English has become particularly difficult since Heidegger’s analyses of it. German and French share the advantage that their infinitives meaning to be (sein, être) can also be used as substantives that mean Being in general. Further, in each language the present participle of the infinitive (seiend, étant) can also be used as a substantive meaning particular beings. No such advantage exists in English, and since Heidegger is always concerned with the distinction between Sein (être, Being in general) and Seiendes (étant, beings) the correct translation of these substantives becomes the first problem for any consideration of Heidegger in English. (The verb forms present no difficulties: sein and être as infinitives become to be, and the gerunds seiend and étant become being.) I have followed the practice of John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson in their translation of Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) and have translated the substantive (derived from the infinitive) Sein (être) as “Being” (with a capital initial) wherever it appears in this volume. However I have modified their translation of Seiendes (étant)—the substantive from the present participle—as “entity” or “entities,” and have translated it as “being” or “beings.” Macquarrie and Robinson, in fact, state that “there is much to be said” for this translation (Being and Time, p. 22, note 1). I feel that it is preferable to “entity” not only because, as they state, “in recent British and American philosophy the term ‘entity’ has been used more generally to apply to anything whatsoever, no matter what its ontological status” (ibid.), but also because “entity” derives from ens, the Latin present participle for the verb to be, esse. No one has been more attentive than Heidegger to the difficulties caused by the translation of Greek thought into Latin. The Latin inheritance of “entity” continues the tradition of these difficulties. Once more, we face the problem of

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the transformation of one language by another. There is one major exception to the translation of êtant by “being,” and this is in Violence and Metaphysics, Derrida’s essay on Emmanuel Levinas. The major work by Levinas under consideration in this essay, Totalité et Infini, has been translated into English. Since much of this work is concerned with Heidegger, I have maintained the translation of étant as “existent”—the solution chosen by Alphonso Lingis, the translator of Totality and Infinity— in all citations from this work. This translation is particularly problematical in that it tends to confuse the distinction (in terms of Being and Time) between the existential, ontological status of Being, and the ontical status of being. The reader is requested to read “being” for “existent” wherever the latter appears. This brings us to another term, one from Heidegger’s later thought—that of difference. From the existential analytic of Dasein— man’s Being—in Being and Time, Heidegger moved to a contemplation of the difference between beings and Being in his later works. He calls this the ontico-ontological difference, and this idea itself is submitted to powerful scrutiny in his Identity and Difference. The title of this work alone should bring it to the attention of the serious reader of Writing and Difference; in the introduction to “Freud and the Scene of Writing” Derrida gives a brief indication of the importance of Identity and Difference to Writing and Difference when he speaks of “différance and identity,” “différance as the preopening of the ontico-ontological difference.” From Identity and Difference also comes the term onto-theology which characterizes Western metaphysics as such. Very roughly put, Heidegger analyzes the contradictions of the logic of presence which is forced to conceive Being as the most general attribute of existence (onto-), and as the “highest,” most specific attribute of God (theo-). Logos is the true verb: the spoken discourse in which the notion of truth governed by this onto-theo-logy of presence is revealed. Also from Identity and Difference, among other places in Heidegger, comes the concept of difference as it is inscribed in the “ontological double genitive,” i.e., the necessary fluctuation of the subjective and objective cases in order to speak of Being, which always means the Being of beings and the beings of Being. From Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, the work which immediately follows Being and Time, comes the term “auto-affection, which Derrida uses often, and which I have discussed briefly in note 25 of “ ‘Genesis

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and Structure’ and Phenomenology.” Briefly here too, “auto-affection” refers to the classical notion of time as a self-produced, infinite chain of present moments that also, as scrutinized by Kant and Heidegger, causes some problems for the traditional opposition of senses and intellect: does time belong to the sensible or the intelligible? From Heidegger’s extended confrontation with Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will comes the concept of voluntarism. Throughout Writing and Difference “voluntarism” must be read in its etymological sense of “doctrine of the will,” deriving as it does from the Latin voluntas (whence our “volition”). The French vouloir, to want, maintains its etymological resonances in more striking fashion than do any of its English equivalents; Derrida plays on these resonances especially in connection with vouloir dire, which means either “meaning” or “to mean,” but has a strong connotation of “the will to say.” The concluding paragraphs of “Cogito and the History of Madness” develop this point. Husserl’s terms. The most important terms from Husserl are the linked concepts of bracketing, epoché, and the phenomenological reduction. These are carefully explained in sections 31, 32, and 33 of Ideas (translated by W. R. Boyce Gibson, New York: Macmillan, 1962). Husserl, following Descartes’s attempt to find absolutely certain truths by putting everything into doubt, proposes to put between brackets (or parentheses) “the general thesis which belongs to the essence of the natural standpoint.” This phenomenological “abstention” (epoché) prohibits the use of any “judgment that concerns spatio-temporal existence” (Ideas, p. 100). “Pure consciousness” becomes accessible through this transcendental epoché, which Husserl therefore speaks of as the phenomenological reduction. The relationship of this “pure consciousness” to “pure essences” is governed by intentionality, for all consciousness is consciousness of something, although again it is not a question of a relationship to a psychological event (experience) or to a real object. Sensory experience, the relationship to hylé (matter) contains nothing intentional for Husserl; it is intentional morphé (form, shape) which bestows meaning on sensory experience. The opposition of hylé to morphé (matter to form) leads Husserl to divide “phenomenological being” into its hyletic and noetic (intentionally meaningful; from the Greek nous, meaning mind or spirit) sides. The pure form of the noesis is

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xxii translator’s introduction in noema, which Husserl construes as the immanent meaning of perception, judgment, appreciation, etc. in the “pure,” i.e., phenomenologically reduced, form of these experiences themselves. As much of Ideas is concerned with the theory of noetic-noematic structures, the reader will appreciate the inadequacy of these remarks. Hegel’s terms. The most important term from Hegel, Aufhebung, is untranslatable due to its double meaning of conservation and negation. (The various attempts to translate Aufhebung into English seem inadequate.) The reader is referred to Derrida’s discussion of the term in “Violence and Metaphysics,” section III, first subsection (“Of the Original Polemic), B, and to the translator’s notes in “From Restricted to General Economy,” where other terms from Hegel are discussed. The Hegelian figure of the “unhappy consciousness” is discussed in note 23 of Violence and Metaphysics, but there is also an important discussion of it at the beginning of “Cogito and the History of Madness.” The unhappy consciousness, for Hegel, is always divided against itself; its historical figure is Abraham, the prototype of the “Jewish” consciousness for which there is an intrinsic conflict between God and nature. In many ways the theme of the unhappy consciousness runs throughout Writing and Difference. “Violence and Metaphysics” is epigraphically submitted to the conflict between the Greek—“happy,” at one with nature—and the Hebraic—unhappy—consciousnesses. Like all inherited oppositions, this one too is programmed by the logic of presence which demands a choice between the terms, or a resolution of the conflict. Derrida pushes the unhappy consciousness to its logical limits in order to bring it to the point where the division within it becomes irreducible. This occurs most importantly in the two essays devoted to Jabès, whose poetry interrogates the meaning of the Jewish, divided consciousness. This interrogation becomes particularly poignant for Derrida in its ties to the Jewish, unhappy consciousness as the experience of the (people of the) Book and Writing, for, as discussed above, these are the inherited concepts which are Derrida’s central targets. Derrida has closed each of the essays on Jabès with the name of one of Jabès’s imaginary rabbis: Rida and Derissa. In this way he alerts us to the “latent,” philosophically “unconscious” impact of Writing and Difference: an expanded concept of difference through the examination of writing.

translator’s introduction

Derrida’s rebus-like play on his own name across this volume reminds us how unlike the Book this one is. All Greek terms have been transliterated. Unless the English translation of a French or German text is specifically referred to, citations of texts in these languages are of my own translation. I owe a debt of thanks to Professor Richard Macksey of the Johns Hopkins University for the assistance he offered me at the outset of this project, and for his generous permission to revise his own fine translation of “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Most of the translation of this essay belongs to Professor Macksey. I consulted Jeffrey Mehlman’s translation of “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” which appeared in Yale French Studies, no. 48 (1972). And I have also profited greatly from the careful scholarship of Rodolphe Gasché’s German translation of L’écriture et la différence (Die Schrift und Die Differenz, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972). ALAN BASS New York City April 1977

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1 FORCE AND SIGNIFICATION It might be that we are all tattooed savages since Sophocles. But there is more to Art than the straightness of lines and the perfection of surfaces. Plasticity of style is not as large as the entire idea. . . . We have too many things and not enough forms. (Flaubert, Préface à la d’écrivain)

If it recedes one day, leaving behind its works and signs on the shores of our civilization, the structuralist invasion might become a question for the historian of ideas, or perhaps even an object. But the historian would be deceived if he came to this pass: by the very act of considering the structuralist invasion as an object he would forget its meaning and would forget that what is at stake, first of all, is an adventure of vision, a conversion of the way of putting questions to any object posed before us, to historical objects—his own—in particular. And, unexpectedly among these, the literary object. By way of analogy: the fact that universal thought, in all its domains, by all its pathways and despite all differences, should be receiving a formidable impulse from an anxiety about language—which can only be an anxiety of language, within language itself—is a strangely concerted development; and it is the nature of this development not to be

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able to display itself in its entirety as a spectacle for the historian, if, by chance, he were to attempt to recognize in it the sign of an epoch, the fashion of a season, or the symptom of a crisis. Whatever the poverty of our knowledge in this respect, it is certain that the question of the sign is itself more or less, or in any event something other, than a sign of the times. To dream of reducing it to a sign of the times is to dream of violence. Especially when this question, an unexpectedly historical one, approaches the point at which the simple significative nature of language appears rather uncertain, partial, or inessential. It will be granted readily that the analogy between the structuralist obsession and the anxiety of language is not a chance one. Therefore, it will never be possible, through some second- or third-hand reflection, to make the structuralism of the twentieth century (and particularly the structuralism of literary criticism, which has eagerly joined the trend) undertake the mission that a structuralist critic has assigned to himself for the nineteenth century: to contribute to a “future history of imagination and affectivity.”1 Nor will it be possible to reduce the fascination inherent in the notion of structure to a phenomenon of fashion,2 except by reconsidering and taking seriously the meanings of imagination, affectivity, and fashion—doubtless the more urgent task. In any event, if some aspect of structuralism belongs to the domains of imagination, affectivity, or fashion, in the popular sense of these words, this aspect will never be the essential one. The structuralist stance, as well as our own attitudes assumed before or within language, are not only moments of history. They are an astonishment rather, by language as the origin of history. By historicity itself. And also, when confronted by the possibility of speech and always already within it, the finally acknowledged repetition of a surprise finally extended to the dimensions of world culture—a surprise incomparable to any other, a surprise responsible for the activation of what is called Western thought, the thought whose destiny is to extend its domains while the boundaries of the West are drawn back. By virtue of its innermost intention, and like all questions about language, structuralism escapes the classical history of ideas which already supposes structuralism’s possibility, for the latter naively belongs to the province of language and propounds itself within it. Nevertheless, by virtue of an irreducible region of irreflection and

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spontaneity within it, by virtue of the essential shadow of the undeclared, the structuralist phenomenon will deserve examination by the historian of ideas. For better or for worse. Everything within this phenomenon that does not in itself transparently belong to the question of the sign will merit this scrutiny; as will everything within it that is methodologically effective, thereby possessing the kind of infallibility now ascribed to sleepwalkers and formerly attributed to instinct, which was said to be as certain as it was blind. It is not a lesser province of the social science called history to have a privileged concern, in the acts and institutions of man, with the immense region of somnambulism, the almost-everything which is not the pure waking state, the sterile and silent acidity of the question itself, the almost-nothing.3 Since we take nourishment from the fecundity of structuralism, it is too soon to dispel our dream. We must muse upon what it might signify from within it. In the future it will be interpreted, perhaps, as a relaxation, if not a lapse, of the attention given to force, which is the tension of force itself. Form fascinates when one no longer has the force to understand force from within itself. That is, to create. This is why literary criticism is structuralist in every age, in its essence and destiny. Criticism has not always known this, but understands it now, and thus is in the process of thinking itself in its own concept, system and method. Criticism henceforth knows itself separated from force, occasionally avenging itself on force by gravely and profoundly proving that separation is the condition of the work, and not only of the discourse on the work.4 Thus is explained the low note, the melancholy pathos that can be perceived behind the triumphant cries of technical ingenuity or mathematical subtlety that sometimes accompany certain so-called “structural” analyses. Like melancholy for Gide, these analyses are possible only after a certain defeat of force and within the movement of diminished ardor. Which makes the structural consciousness consciousness in general, as a conceptualization of the past, I mean of facts in general. A reflection of the accomplished, the constituted, the constructed. Historical, eschatalogical, and crepuscular by its very situation. But within structure there is not only form, relation, and configuration. There is also interdependency and a totality which is always concrete. In literary criticism, the structural “perspective” is, according

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to Jean-Pierre Richard’s expression, “interrogative and totalitarian.”5 The force of our weakness is that impotence separates, disengages, and emancipates. Henceforth, the totality is more clearly perceived, the panorama and the panoramagram are possible. The panoramagram, the very image of the structuralist instrument, was invented in 1824, as Littré states, in order “to obtain immediately, on a flat surface, the development of depth vision of objects on the horizon.” Thanks to a more or less openly acknowledged schematization and spatialization, one can glance over the field divested of its forces more freely or diagrammatically. Or one can glance over the totality divested of its forces, even if it is the totality of form and meaning, for what is in question, in this case, is meaning rethought as form; and structure is the formal unity of form and meaning. It will be said that this neutralization of meaning by form is the author’s responsibility before being the critic’s, and to a certain extent—but it is just this extent which is in question—this is correct. In any event, the project of a conceptualization of totality is more easily stated today, and such a project in and of itself escapes the determined totalities of classical history. For it is the project of exceeding them. Thus, the relief and design of structures appears more clearly when content, which is the living energy of meaning, is neutralized. Somewhat like the architecture of an uninhabited or deserted city, reduced to its skeleton by some catastrophe of nature or art. A city no longer inhabited, not simply left behind, but haunted by meaning and culture. This state of being haunted, which keeps the city from returning to nature, is perhaps the general mode of the presence or absence of the thing itself in pure language. The pure language that would be housed in pure literature, the object of pure literary criticism. Thus it is in no way paradoxical that the structuralist consciousness is a catastrophic consciousness, simultaneously destroyed and destructive, destructuring, as is all consciousness, or at least the moment of decadence, which is the period proper to all movement of consciousness. Structure is perceived through the incidence of menace, at the moment when imminent danger concentrates our vision on the keystone of an institution, the stone which encapsulates both the possibility and the fragility of its existence. Structure then can be methodically threatened in order to be comprehended more clearly and to reveal not only its supports but also that secret place in which it is neither construction nor ruin but

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lability. This operation is called (from the Latin) soliciting. In other words, shaking in a way related to the whole (from sollus, in archaic Latin “the whole,” and from citare, “to put in motion”). The structuralist solicitude and solicitation give themselves only the illusion of technical liberty when they become methodical. In truth, they reproduce, in the register of method, a solicitude and solicitation of Being, a historicometaphysical threatening of foundations. It is during the epochs of historical dislocation, when we are expelled from the site, that this structuralist passion, which is simultaneously a frenzy of experimentation and a proliferation of schematizations, develops for itself. The baroque would only be one example of it. Has not a “structural poetics” “founded on a rhetoric”6 been mentioned in relation to the baroque? But has not a “burst structure” also been spoken of, a “rent poem whose structure appears as it bursts apart”?7 The liberty that this critical (in all the senses of this word)8 disengagement assures us of, therefore, is a solicitude for and an opening into totality. But what does this opening hide? And hide, not by virtue of what it leaves aside and out of sight, but by virtue of its very power to illuminate. One continually asks oneself this question in reading Jean Rousset’s fine book: Forme et signification: Essais sur les structures littéraires de Corneille à Claudel.9 Our question is not a reaction against what others have called “ingenuity” and what seems to us, except in a few instances, to be something more and something better. Confronted by this series of brilliant and penetrating exercises intended to illustrate a method, it is rather a question of unburdening ourselves of a mute anxiety, and of doing so at the point at which this anxiety is not only ours, the reader’s, but also seems to conform, beneath the language, operations, and greatest achievements of this book, to the anxiety of the author himself. Rousset certainly acknowledges kinships and affiliations: Bachelard, Poulet, Raymond, Picon, Starobinski, Richard, etc. However, despite the familial air, the many borrowings and numerous respectful acknowledgments, Forme et Signification seems to us, in many respects, a solitary attempt. In the first place, this is due to a deliberate difference. Rousset does not isolate himself within this difference, keeping his distance; rather, he scrupulously examines a community of intentions by bringing to the

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surface enigmas hidden beneath values that are today accepted and respected—modern values they may be, but values already traditional enough to have become the commonplaces of criticism, making them, therefore, open to reflection and suspicion. Rousset presents his theses in a remarkable methodological introduction that, along with the introduction to l’Univers imaginaire de Mallarmé, should become an important part of the discourse on method in literary criticism. In multiplying his introductory references Rousset does not muddle his discourse but, on the contrary, weaves a net that tightens its originality. For example: that in the literary fact language is one with meaning, that form belongs to the content of the work; that, according to the expression of Gaeton Picon, “for modern art, the work is not expression but creation”10—these are propositions that gain unanimous acceptance only by means of a highly equivocal notion of form or expression. The same goes for the notion of imagination, the power of mediation or synthesis between meaning and literality, the common root of the universal and the particular—as of all other similarly dissociated couples—the obscure origin of these structural frameworks and of the empathy between “form and content” which makes possible both the work and the access to its unity. For Kant, the imagination was already in itself an “art,” was art itself, which originally did not distinguish between truth and beauty; and despite all the differences, Kant speaks of the same imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgment as does Rousset. It is art, certainly, but a “hidden art”11 that cannot be “revealed to the eyes.”12 “Now since the reduction of a representation of the imagination to concepts is equivalent to giving its exponents, the aesthetic idea may be called an inexponible representation of the imagination (in its free play).”13 Imagination is the freedom that reveals itself only in its works. These works do not exist within nature, but neither do they inhabit a world other than ours. “The imagination (as a productive faculty of cognition) is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.”14 This is why intelligence is not necessarily the essential faculty of the critic when he sets out to encounter imagination and beauty; “in what we call beautiful, intelligence is at the service of the imagination, and the latter is not at the service of intelligence.”15 For “the freedom of the imagination consists precisely

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in the fact that it schematizes without a concept.”16 This enigmatic origin of the work as a structure and indissociable unity—and as an object for structuralist criticism—is, according to Kant, “the first thing to which we must pay attention.”17 According to Rousset also. From his first page on, he links “the nature of the literary fact,” always insufficiently examined, to the “role in art of imagination, that fundamental activity” about which “uncertainties and oppositions abound.” This notion of an imagination that produces metaphor—that is, everything in language except the verb to be—remains for critics what certain philosophers today call a naively utilized operative concept. To surmount this technical ingenuousness is to reflect the operative concept as a thematic concept. This seems to be one of Rousset’s projects. To grasp the operation of creative imagination at the greatest possible proximity to it, one must turn oneself toward the invisible interior of poetic freedom. One must be separated from oneself in order to be reunited with the blind origin of the work in its darkness. This experience of conversion, which founds the literary act (writing or reading), is such that the very words “separation” and “exile,” which always designate the interiority of a breaking-off with the world and a making of one’s way within it, cannot directly manifest the experience; they can only indicate it through a metaphor whose genealogy itself would deserve all of our efforts.18 For in question here is a departure from the world toward a place which is neither a non-place nor an other world, neither a utopia nor an alibi, the creation of “a universe to be added to the universe,” according to an expression of Focillon’s cited by Rousset (Forme et Signification, p. 11). This universe articulates only that which is in excess of everything, the essential nothing on whose basis everything can appear and be produced within language; and the voice of Maurice Blanchot reminds us, with the insistence of profundity, that this excess is the very possibility of writing and of literary inspiration in general. Only pure absence—not the absence of this or that, but the absence of everything in which all presence is announced—can inspire, in other words, can work, and then make one work. The pure book naturally turns toward the eastern edge of this absence which, beyond or within the prodigiousness of all wealth, is its first and proper content. The pure book, the book itself, by virtue of what is most irreplaceable within it, must be the “book about nothing”

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that Flaubert dreamed of—a gray, negative dream, the origin of the total Book that haunted other imaginations. This emptiness as the situation of literature must be acknowledged by the critic as that which constitutes the specificity of his object, as that around which he always speaks. Or rather, his proper object—since nothing is not an object—is the way in which this nothing itself is determined by disappearing. It is the transition to the determination of the work as the disguising of its origin. But the origin is possible and conceivable only in disguise. Rousset shows us the extent to which spirits as diverse as Delacroix, Balzac, Flaubert, Valéry, Proust, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and many others had a sure consciousness of this. A sure and certain consciousness, although in principle not a clear and distinct one, as there is not intuition of a thing involved.19 To these voices should be added that of Antonin Artaud, who was less roundabout: “I made my debut in literature by writing books in order to say that I could write nothing at all. My thoughts, when I had something to say or write, were that which was furthest from me. I never had any ideas, and two short books, each seventy pages long, are about this profound, inveterate, endemic absence of any idea. These books are l’Ombilic des limbes and le Pèse-nerfs.”20 The consciousness of having something to say as the consciousness of nothing: this is not the poorest, but the most oppressed of consciousnesses. It is the consciousness of nothing, upon which all consciousness of something enriches itself, takes on meaning and shape. And upon whose basis all speech can be brought forth. For the thought of the thing as what it is has already been confused with the experience of pure speech; and this experience has been confused with experience itself. Now, does not pure speech require inscription21 somewhat in the manner that the Leibnizian essence requires existence and pushes on toward the world, like power toward the act? If the anguish of writing is not and must not be a determined pathos, it is because this anguish is not an empirical modification or state of the writer, but is the responsibility of angustia:22 the necessarily restricted passageway of speech against which all possible meanings push each other, preventing each other’s emergence. Preventing, but calling upon each other, provoking each other too, unforeseeably and as if despite oneself, in a kind of autonomous overassemblage of meanings, a power of pure equivocality that makes the creativity of the classical God appear all too poor.

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Speaking frightens me because, by never saying enough, I also say too much. And if the necessity of becoming breath or speech restricts meaning—and our responsibility for it—writing restricts and constrains speech further still.23 Writing is the anguish of the Hebraic ruah,24 experienced in solitude by human responsibility; experienced by Jeremiah subjected to God’s dictation (“Take thee a roll of a book, and write therein all the words that I have spoken unto thee”), or by Baruch transcribing Jeremiah’s dictation (Jeremiah 36:2,4); or further, within the properly human moment of pneumatology, the science of pneuma, spiritus, or logos which was divided into three parts: the divine, the angelical and the human. It is the moment at which we must decide whether we will engrave what we hear. And whether engraving preserves or betrays speech. God, the God of Leibniz, since we have just spoken of him, did not know the anguish of the choice between various possibilities: he conceived possible choices in action and disposed of them as such in his Understanding or Logos; and, in any event, the narrowness of a passageway that is Will favors the “best” choice. And each existence continues to “express” the totality of the Universe. There is, therefore, no tragedy of the book. There is only one Book, and this same Book is distributed throughout all books. In the Theodicy, Theodorus, who “had become able to confront the divine radiancy of the daughter of Jupiter,” is led by her to the “palace of the fates;” in this palace “Jupiter, having surveyed them before the beginning of the existing world, classified the possibilities into worlds, and chose the best of all. He comes sometimes to visit these places, to enjoy the pleasure of recapitulating things and of renewing his own choice, which cannot fail to please him.” After being told all this by Pallas, Theodorus is led into a hall which “was a world.” “There was a great volume of writings in this hall: Theodorus could not refrain from asking what that meant. It is the history of this world which we are now visiting, the Goddess told him; it is the book of its fates. You have seen a number on the forehead of Sextus. Look in this book for the place which it indicates. Theodorus looked for it, and found there the history of Sextus in a form more ample than the outline he had seen. Put your finger on any line you please, Pallas said to him, and you will see represented actually in all its detail that which the line broadly indicates. He obeyed, and he saw

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coming into view all the characteristics of a portion of the life of that Sextus.”25 To write is not only to conceive the Leibnizian book as an impossible possibility. Impossible possibility, the limit explicitly named by Mallarmé. To Verlaine: “I will go even further and say: the Book, for I am convinced that there is only One, and that it has [unwittingly] been attempted by every writer, even by Geniuses.”26 “ . . . revealing that, in general, all books contain the amalgamation of a certain number of age-old truths; that actually there is only one book on earth, that it is the law of the earth, the earth’s true Bible. The difference between individual works is simply the difference between individual interpretations of one true and established text, which are proposed in a mighty gathering of those ages we call civilized or literary.”27 To write is not only to know that the Book does not exist and that forever there are books, against which the meaning of a world not conceived by an absolute subject is shattered, before it has even become a unique meaning; nor is it only to know that the non-written and the non-read cannot be relegated to the status of having no basis by the obliging negativity of some dialectic, making us deplore the absence of the Book from under the burden of “too many texts!” It is not only to have lost the theological certainty of seeing every page bind itself into the unique text of the truth, the “book of reason” as the journal in which accounts (rationes) and experiences consigned for Memory was formerly called,28 the genealogical anthology, the Book of Reason this time, the infinite manuscript read by a God who, in a more or less deferred way, is said to have given us use of his pen. This lost certainty, this absence of divine writing, that is to say, first of all, the absence of the Jewish God (who himself writes, when necessary), does not solely and vaguely define something like “modernity.” As the absence and haunting of the divine sign, it regulates all modern criticism and aesthetics. There is nothing astonishing about this. “Consciously or not,” says Georges Canguilhem, “the idea that man has of his poetic power corresponds to the idea he has about the creation of the world; and to the solution he gives to the problem of the radical origin of things. If the notion of creation is equivocal, ontological and aesthetic, it is not so by chance or confusion.”29 To write is not only to know that through writing, through the extremities of style, the best will not

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necessarily transpire, as Leibniz thought it did in divine creation, nor will the transition to what transpires always be willful, nor will that which is noted down always infinitely express the universe, resembling and reassembling it.30 It is also to be incapable of making meaning absolutely precede writing: it is thus to lower meaning while simultaneously elevating inscription. The eternal fraternity of theological optimism and of pessimism: nothing is more reassuring, but nothing is more despairing, more destructive of our books than the Leibnizian Book. On what could books in general live, what would they be if they were not alone, so alone, infinite, isolated worlds? To write is to know that what has not yet been produced within literality has no other dwelling place, does not await us as prescription in some topos ouranios, or some divine understanding. Meaning must await being said or written in order to inhabit itself, and in order to become, by differing from itself, what it is: meaning. This is what Husserl teaches us to think in The Origin of Geometry. The literary act thus recovers its true power at its source. In a fragment of a book he intended to devote to The Origin of Truth, Merleau-Ponty wrote: “Communication in literature is not the simple appeal on the part of the writer to meanings which would be part of an a priori of the mind; rather, communication arouses these meanings in the mind through enticement and a kind of oblique action. The writer’s thought does not control his language from without; the writer is himself a kind of new idiom, constructing itself.”31 “My own words take me by surprise and teach me what I think,”32 he said elsewhere. It is because writing is inaugural, in the fresh sense of the word, that it is dangerous and anguishing. It does not know where it is going, no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation toward the meaning that it constitutes and that is, primarily, its future. However, it is capricious only through cowardice. There is thus no insurance against the risk of writing. Writing is an initial and graceless recourse for the writer, even if he is not an atheist but, rather, a writer. Did Saint John Chrysostom speak of the writer? “It were indeed meet for us not at all to require the aid of the written Word, but to exhibit a life so pure, that the grace of the spirit should be instead of books to our souls, and that as these are inscribed with ink, even so should our hearts be with the Spirit. But, since we have utterly put away from us

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this grace, come let us at any rate embrace the second best course.”33 But, all faith or theological assurance aside, is not the experience of secondarity tied to the strange redoubling by means of which constituted—written—meaning presents itself as prerequisitely and simultaneously read: and does not meaning present itself as such at the point at which the other is found, the other who maintains both the vigil and the back-and-forth motion, the work, that comes between writing and reading, making this work irreducible? Meaning is neither before nor after the act. Is not that which is called God, that which imprints every human course and recourse with its secondarity, the passageway of deferred reciprocity between reading and writing? or the absolute witness to the dialogue in which what one sets out to write has already been read, and what one sets out to say is already a response, the third party as the transparency of meaning? Simultaneously part of creation and the Father of Logos. The circularity and traditionality of Logos. The strange labor of conversion and adventure in which grace can only be that which is missing. Thus, the notion of an Idea or “interior design” as simply anterior to a work which would supposedly be the expression of it, is a prejudice: a prejudice of the traditional criticism called idealist. It is not by chance that this theory—or, one could now say, this theology—flowered during the Renaissance. Rousset, like so many others past or present, certainly speaks out against this “Platonism” or “Neo-Platonism.” But he does not forget that if creation by means of “the form rich in ideas” (Valéry) is not the purely transparent expression of this form, it is nevertheless, simultaneously, revelation. If creation were not revelation, what would happen to the finitude of the writer and to the solitude of his hand abandoned by God? Divine creativity, in this case, would be reappropriated by a hypocritical humanism. If writing is inaugural it is not so because it creates, but because of a certain absolute freedom of speech, because of the freedom to bring forth the already-there as a sign of the freedom to augur. A freedom of response which acknowledges as its only horizon the world as history and the speech which can only say: Being has always already begun. To create is to reveal, says Rousset, who does not turn his back on classical criticism. He comprehends it, rather, and enters into dialogue with it: “Prerequisite secret and unmasking of this secret by the work: a reconciliation of ancient and modern aesthet-

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ics can be observed, in a certain way, in the possible correspondence of the preexisting secret to the Idea of the Renaissance thinkers stripped of all Neo-Platonism.” This revelatory power of true literary language as poetry is indeed the access to free speech, speech unburdened of its signalizing functions by the word “Being” (and this, perhaps, is what is aimed at beneath the notion of the “primitive word” or the “theme-word,” Leitwort, of Buber).34 It is when that which is written is deceased as a signsignal that it is born as language; for then it says what is, thereby referring only to itself, a sign without signification, a game or pure functioning, since it ceased to be utilized as natural, biological, or technical information, or as the transition from one existent to another, from a signifier to a signified. And, paradoxically, inscription alone— although it is far from always doing so—has the power of poetry, in other words has the power to arouse speech from its slumber as sign. By enregistering speech, inscription has as its essential objective, and indeed takes this fatal risk, the emancipation of meaning—as concerns any actual field of perception—from the natural predicament in which everything refers to the disposition of a contingent situation. This is why writing will never be simple “voice-painting” (Voltaire). It creates meaning by enregistering it, by entrusting it to an engraving, a groove, a relief, to a surface whose essential characteristic is to be infinitely transmissible. Not that this characteristic is always desired, nor has it always been; and writing as the origin of pure historicity, pure traditionality, is only the telos of a history of writing whose philosophy is always to come. Whether this project of an infinite tradition is realized or not, it must be acknowledged and respected in its sense as a project. That it can always fail is the mark of its pure finitude and its pure historicity. If the play of meaning can overflow signification (signalization), which is always enveloped within the regional limits of nature, life and the soul, this overflow is the moment of the attempt-to-write. The attempt-to-write cannot be understood on the basis of voluntarism. The will to write is not an ulterior determination of a primal will. On the contrary, the will to write reawakens the willful sense of the will: freedom, break with the domain of empirical history, a break whose aim is reconciliation with the hidden essence of the empirical, with pure historicity. The will and the attempt to write are not the

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desire to write, for it is a question here not of affectivity but of freedom and duty. In its relationship to Being, the attempt-to-write poses itself as the only way out of affectivity. A way out that can only be aimed at, and without the certainty that deliverance is possible or that it is outside affectivity. To be affected is to be finite: to write could still be to deceive finitude, and to reach Being—a kind of Being which could neither be, nor affect me by itself—from without existence. To write would be to attempt to forget difference: to forget writing in the presence of so-called living and pure speech.35 In the extent to which the literary act proceeds from this attempt-towrite, it is indeed the acknowledgment of pure language, the responsibility confronting the vocation of “pure” speech which, once understood, constitutes the writer as such. Heidegger says of pure speech that it cannot “be conceived in the rigor of its essence” on the basis of its “character-as-sign” (Zeichencharakter), “nor even perhaps of its character-as-signification” (Bedeutungscharakter).36 Does not one thus run the risk of identifying the work with original writing in general? Of dissolving the notion of art and the value of “beauty” by which literature is currently distinguished from the letter in general? But perhaps by removing the specificity of beauty from aesthetic values, beauty is, on the contrary, liberated? Is there a specificity of beauty, and would beauty gain from this effort? Rousset believes so. And the structuralism proper to Jean Rousset is defined, at least theoretically, against the temptation to overlook this specificity (the temptation that would be Poulet’s, for example, since he “has little interest in art”),37 putting Rousset close to Leo Spitzer and Marcel Raymond in his scrupulousness about the formal autonomy of the work—an “independent, absolute organism that is self-sufficient” (Forme et Signification p. xx). “The work is a totality and always gains from being experienced as such” (p. xxi). But here again, Rousset’s position depends upon a delicate balance. Always attentive to the unified foundations of dissociation, he circumvents the “objectivist” danger denounced by Poulet by giving a definition of structure that is not purely objective or formal; or circumvents the “objectivist” danger denounced by Poulet by giving a definition of structure that is not purely objective or formal; or circumvents it by at least not in principle dissociating form from intention, or from the very act of the writer: “I

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will call ‘structures’ these formal constants, these liaisons that betray a mental universe reinvented by each artist according to his needs” (p. xii). Structure is then the unity of a form and a meaning. It is true that in some places the form of the work, or the form as the work, is treated as if it had no origin, as if, again, in the masterpiece—and Rousset is interested only in masterpieces—the wellbeing of the work was without history. Without an intrinsic history. It is here that structuralism seems quite vulnerable, and it is here that, by virtue of one whole aspect of his attempt—which is far from covering it entirely—Rousset too runs the risk of conventional Platonism. By keeping to the legitimate intention of protecting the internal truth and meaning of the work from historicism, biographism or psychologism (which, moreover, always lurk near the expression “mental universe”), one risks losing any attentiveness to the internal historicity of the work itself, in its relationship to a subjective origin that is not simply psychological or mental. If one takes care to confine classical literary history to its role as an “indispensable” “auxiliary,” as “prologomenon and restraint” (p. xii, n. 16), one risks overlooking another history, more difficult to conceive: the history of the meaning of the work itself, of its operation. This history of the work is not only its past, the eve or the sleep in which it precedes itself in an author’s intentions, but is also the impossibility of its ever being present, of its ever being summarized by some absolute simultaneity or instantaneousness. This is why, as we will verify, there is no space of the work, if by space we mean presence and synopsis. And, further on, we will see what the consequences of this can be for the tasks of criticism. It seems, for the moment, that if “literary history” (even when its techniques and its “philosophy” are renewed by “Marxism,” “Freudianism,” etc.) is only a restraint on the internal criticism of the work, then the structuralist moment of this criticism has the counterpart role of being the restraint on an internal geneticism, in which value and meaning are reconstituted and reawakened in their proper historicity and temporality. These latter can no longer be objects without becoming absurdities, and the structure proper to them must escape all classical categories. Certainly, Rousset’s avowed plan is to avoid this stasis of form, the stasis of a form whose completion appears to liberate it from work, from imagination and from the origin through which alone it can

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continue to signify. Thus, when he distinguishes his task from that of Jean-Pierre Richard,38 Rousset aims directly at this totality of thing and act, form and intention, entelechy and becoming, the totality that is the literary fact as a concrete form: “Is it possible to embrace simultaneously imagination and morphology, to experience and to comprehend them in a simultaneous act? This is what I would like to attempt, although well persuaded that this undertaking, before being unitary, will often have to make itself alternative [my italics]. But the end in sight is indeed the simultaneous comprehension of a homogenous reality in a unifying operation” (p. xxii). But condemned or resigned to alternation, the critic, in acknowledging it, is also liberated and acquitted by it. And it is here that Rousset’s difference is no longer deliberate. His personality, his style will affirm themselves not through a methodological decision but through the play of the critic’s spontaneity within the freedom of the “alternative.” This spontaneity will, in fact, unbalance an alternation construed by Rousset as a theoretical norm. A practiced inflection that also provides the style of criticism—here Rousset’s—with its structural form. This latter, Claude Lévi-Strauss remarks about social models and Rousset about structural motifs in a literary work, “escapes creative will and clear consciousness” (p. xv). What then is the imbalance of this preference? What is the preponderance that is more actualized than acknowledged? It seems to be double.

II There are lines which are monsters. . . . A line by itself has no meaning; a second one is necessary to give expression to meaning. Important law. (Delacroix) Valley is a common female dream symbol. (Freud)

On the one hand, structure becomes the object itself, the literary thing itself. It is no longer what it almost universally was before: either a heuristic instrument, a method of reading, a characteristic particularly revelatory of content, or a system of objective relations, independent of

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content and terminology; or, most often, both at once, for the fecundity of structure did not exclude, but, on the contrary, rather implied that relational configuration exists within the literary object. A structural realism has always been practiced, more or less explicitly. But never has structure been the exclusive term—in the double sense of the word—of critical description. It was always a means or relationship for reading or writing, for assembling significations, recognizing themes, ordering constants and correspondences. Here, structure, the framework of construction, morphological correlation, becomes in fact and despite his theoretical intention the critic’s sole preoccupation. His sole or almost sole preoccupation. No longer a method within the ordo cognescendi, no longer a relationship in the ordo essendi, but the very being of the work. We are concerned with an ultrastructuralism. On the other hand (and consequently), structure as the literary thing is this time taken, or at least practiced, literally. Now, stricto sensu, the notion of structure refers only to space, geometric or morphological space, the order of forms and sites. Structure is first the structure of an organic or artificial work, the internal unity of an assemblage, a construction; a work is governed by a unifying principle, the architecture that is built and made visible in a location. “Superbes monuments de l’orgueil des humains, / Pyramides, tombeaux, dont la noble structure / a temoigné que l’art, par l’adresse des mains / Et l’assidu travail peut vaincre la nature” (“Splendid monuments of human pride, pyramids, tombs, whose noble structure Bears witness that art, through the skill of hands and hard work, can vanquish nature”—Scarron). Only metaphorically was this topographical literality displaced in the direction of its Aristotelean and topical signification (the theory of commonplaces in language and the manipulation of motifs or arguments.) In the seventeenth century they spoke of “the choice and arrangement of words, the structure and harmony of the composition, the modest grandeur of the thoughts.”39 Or further: “In bad structure there is always something to be added, or diminished, or changed, not simply as concerns the topic, but also the words.”40 How is this history of metaphor possible? Does the fact that language can determine things only by spatializing them suffice to explain that, in return, language must spatialize itself as soon as it designates and

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reflects upon itself? This question can be asked in general about all language and all metaphors. But here it takes on a particular urgency. Hence, for as long as the metaphorical sense of the notion of structure is not acknowledged as such, that is to say interrogated and even destroyed as concerns its figurative quality so that the nonspatiality or original spatiality designated by it may be revived, one runs the risk, through a kind of sliding as unnoticed as it is efficacious, of confusing meaning with its geometric, morphological, or, in the best of cases, cinematic model. One risks being interested in the figure itself to the detriment of the play going on within it metaphorically. (Here, we are taking the word “figure” in its geometric as well as rhetorical sense. In Rousset’s style, figures of rhetoric are always the figures of a geometry distinguished by its suppleness.) Now, despite his stated propositions, and although he calls structure the union of formal structure and intention, Rousset, in his analyses, grants an absolute privilege to spatial models, mathematical functions, lines, and forms. Many examples could be cited in which the essence of his descriptions is reduced to this. Doubtless, he acknowledges the interdependency of space and time (Forme et Signification, p. xiv). But, in fact, time itself is always reduced. To a dimension in the best of cases. It is only the element in which a form or a curve can be displayed. It is always in league with a line or design, always extended in space, level. It calls for measurement. Now, even if one does not follow Claude LéviStrauss when he asserts that there “is no necessary connection between measure and structure,”41 one must acknowledge that for certain kinds of structures—those of literary ideality in particular—this connection is excluded in principle. The geometric or morphological elements of Forme et Signification are corrected only by a kind of mechanism, never by energetics. Mutatis mutandis, one might be tempted to make the same reproach to Rousset, and through him to the best literary formalism, as Leibniz made to Descartes: that of having explained everything in nature with figures and movements, and of ignoring force by confusing it with the quantity of movement. Now, in the sphere of language and writing, which, more than the body, “corresponds to the soul,” “the ideas of size, figure and motion are not so distinctive as is imagined, and . . . stand for something imaginary relative to our perceptions.”42

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This geometry is only metaphorical, it will be said. Certainly. But metaphor is never innocent. It orients research and fixes results. When the spatial model is hit upon, when it functions, critical reflection rests within it. In fact, and even if criticism does not admit this to be so. One example among many others. At the beginning of the essay entitled “Polyeucte, or the Ring and the Helix,” the author prudently warns us that if he insists upon “schemas that might appear excessively geometrical, it is because Corneille, more than any other, practiced symmetry.” Moreover, “this geometry is not cultivated for itself,” for “in the great plays it is a means subordinated to the ends of passion” (p. 7). But what, in fact, does this essay yield? Only the geometry of a theater which is, however, one of “mad passion, heroic enthusiasm” (p. 7). Not only does the geometric structure of Polyeucte mobilize all the resources and attention of the author, but an entire teleology of Corneille’s progress is coordinated to it. Everything transpires as if, until 1643, Corneille had only gotten a glimpse of, or anticipated the design of, Polyeucte, which was still in the shadows and which would eventually coincide with the Corneillean design itself, thereby taking on the dignity of an entelechy toward which everything would be in motion. Corneille’s work and development are put into perspective and interpreted teleologically on the basis of what is considered its destination, its final structure. Before Polyeucte, everything is but a sketch in which only what is missing is due consideration, those elements which are still shapeless and lacking as concerns the perfection to come, or which only foretell this perfection. “There were several years between La galerie du palais and Polyeucte. Corneille looks for and finds himself. I will not here trace the details of his progress, in which Le Cid and Cinna show him inventing his own structure” (p. 9). After Polyeucte? It is never mentioned. Similarly, among the works prior to it, only La galerie du palais and Le Cid are taken into account, and these plays are examined, in the style of preformationism, only as structural prefigurations of Polyeucte. Thus, in La galerie du palais the inconstancy of Célidée separates her from her lover. Tired of her inconstancy (but why?), she draws near him again, while he, in turn, feigns inconstancy. They thus separate, to be united at the end of the play, which is outlined as follows: “Initial accord, separation, median reunification that fails, second separation

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symmetrical to the first, final conjunction. The destination is a return to the point of departure after a circuit in the form of a crossed ring” (p. 8). What is singular is the crossed ring, for the destination as return to the point of departure is of the commonest devices. Proust himself . . . (cf. p. 144). The framework is analogous in Le Cid: “The ring-like movement with a median crossing is maintained” (p. 9). But here a new signification intervenes, one that panorography immediately transcribes in a new dimension. In effect, “at each step along the way, the lovers develop and grow, not only each one for himself, but through the other and for the other, according to a very Corneillean [my italic] law of progressively discovered interdependence; their union is made stronger and deeper by the very ruptures that should have destroyed it. Here, the phases of distanciation are no longer phases of separation and inconstancy, but tests of fidelity” (p. 9). The difference between La galerie du palais and Le Cid, one could be led to believe, is no longer in the design and movement of presences (distance-proximity), but in the quality and inner intensity of the experiences (tests of fidelity, manner of being for the other, force of rupture, etc.). And it could be thought that by virtue of the very enrichment of the play, the structural metaphor will now be incapable of grasping the play’s quality and intensity, and that the work of forces will no longer be translated into a difference of form. In believing so one would underestimate the resources of the critic. The dimension of height will now complete the analogical equipment. What is gained in the tension of sentiments (quality of fidelity, way of being-for-the-other, etc.) is gained in terms of elevation; for values, as we know, mount scalewise, and the Good is most high. The union of the lovers is deepened by an “aspiration toward the highest” (p. 9). Altus: the deep is the high. The ring, which remains, has become an “ascending spiral” and “helical ascent.” And the horizontal flatness of La galerie was only an appearance still hiding the essential: the ascending movement. Le Cid only begins to reveal it: “Also the destination (in Le Cid), even if it apparently leads back to the initial conjunction, is not at all a return to the point of departure; the situation has changed, for the characters have been elevated. This is the essential [my italics]: the Corneillean movement is a movement of violent elevation . . .” (but where has this violence and the force of movement, which is more than its quantity or

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direction, been spoken of?) “. . . of aspiration toward the highest; joined to the crossing of two rings, it now traces an ascending spiral, helical ascent. This formal combination will receive all the richness of its signification in Polyeucte” (p. 9). The structure thus was a receptive one, waiting, like a girl in love, ready for its future meaning to marry and fecundate it. We would be convinced if beauty, which is value and force, were subject to regulation and schematization. Must it be shown once more that this is without sense? Thus, if Le Cid is beautiful, it is so by virtue of that within it which surpasses schemes and understanding. Thus, one does not speak of Le Cid itself, if it is beautiful, in terms of rings, spirals, and helices. If the movement of these lines is not Le Cid, neither will it become Polyeucte as it perfects itself still further. It is not the truth of Le Cid or of Polyeucte. Nor is it the psychological truth of passion, faith, duty, etc., but, it will be said, it is this truth according to Corneille; not according to Pierre Corneille, whose biography and psychology do not interest us here: the “movement toward the highest,” the greatest specificity of the schema, is none other than the Corneillean movement (p. 1). The progress indicated by Le Cid, which also aspires to the heights of Polyeucte is a “progress in the Corneillean meaning” (ibid.). It would be helpful here to reproduce the analysis of Polyeucte,43 in which the schema reaches its greatest perfection and greatest internal complication; and does so with a mastery such that one wonders whether the credit is due Corneille or Rousset. We said above that the latter was too Cartesian and not Leibnizian enough. Let us be more precise. He is also Leibnizian: he seems to think that, confronted with a literary work, one should always be able to find a line, no matter how complex, that accounts for the unity, the totality of its movement, and all the points it must traverse. In the Discourse on Metaphysics, Leibniz writes, in effect: “Because, let us suppose for example that someone jots down a quantity of points upon a sheet of paper helter skelter, as do those who exercise the ridiculous art of Geomancy; now I say that it is possible to find a geometrical line whose concept shall be uniform and constant, that is, in accordance with a certain formula, and which line at the same time shall pass through all of those points, and in the same order in which the hand jotted them down; also if a continuous line be traced, which is now

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straight, now circular, and now of any other description, it is possible to find a mental equivalent, a formula or an equation common to all the points of this line by virtue of which formula the changes in the direction of the line must occur. There is no instance of a fact whose contour does not form part of a geometric line and which can not be traced entire by a certain mathematical motion.”44 But Leibniz was speaking of divine creation and intelligence: “I use these comparisons to picture a certain imperfect resemblance to the divine wisdom. . . . I do not pretend at all to explain thus the great mystery upon which depends the whole universe.”45 As concerns qualities, forces and values, and also as concerns nondivine works read by finite minds, this confidence in mathematical-spatial representation seems to be (on the scale of an entire civilization, for we are no longer dealing with the question of Rousset’s language, but with the totality of our language and its credence) analogous to the confidence placed by Canaque artists46 in the level representation of depth. A confidence that the structural ethnographer analyzes, moreover, with more prudence and less abandon than formerly. Our intention here is not, through the simple motions of balancing, equilibration or overturning, to oppose duration to space, quality to quantity, force to form, the depth of meaning or value to the surface of figures. Quite to the contrary. To counter this simple alternative, to counter the simple choice of one of the terms or one of the series against the other, we maintain that it is necessary to seek new concepts and new models, an economy escaping this system of metaphysical oppositions. This economy would not be an energetics of pure, shapeless force. The differences examined simultaneously would be differences of site47 and differences of force. If we appear to oppose one series to the other, it is because from within the classical system we wish to make apparent the noncritical privilege naively granted to the other series by a certain structuralism. Our discourse irreducibly belongs to the system of metaphysical oppositions. The break with this structure of belonging can be announced only through a certain organization, a certain strategic arrangement which, within the field of metaphysical opposition, uses the strengths of the field to turn its own stratagems against it, producing a force of dislocation that spreads itself throughout the entire system, fissuring it in every direction and thoroughly delimiting it.48

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Assuming that, in order to avoid “abstractionism,” one fixes upon— as Rousset does at least theoretically—the union of form and meaning, one then would have to say that the aspiration toward the highest, in the “final leap which will unite them . . . in God,” etc., the passionate, qualitative, intensive, etc., aspiration, finds its form in the spiraling movement. But to say further that this union—which, moreover authorizes every metaphor of elevation—is difference itself, Corneille’s own idiom— is this to say much? And if this were the essential aspect of “Corneillean movement,” where would Corneille be? Why is there more beauty in Polyeucte than in “an ascending movement of two rings”? The force of the work, the force of genius, the force, too, of that which engenders in general is precisely that which resists geometrical metaphorization and is the proper object of literary criticism. In another sense than Poulet’s, Rousset sometimes seems to have “little interest in art.” Unless Rousset considers every line, every spatial form (but every form is spatial) beautiful a priori, unless he deems, as did a certain medieval theology (Considérans in particular), that form is transcendentally beautiful, since it is and makes things be, and that Being is Beautiful; these were truths for this theology to the extent that monsters themselves, as it was said, were beautiful, in that they exist through line or form, which bear witness to the order of the created universe and reflect divine light. Formosus means beautiful. Will Buffon not say too, in his Supplement to Natural History (vol. XI, p. 417): “Most monsters are such with symmetry, the disarray of the parts seeming to have been arranged in orderly fashion?” Now, Rousset does not seem to posit, in his theoretical Introduction, that every form is beautiful, but only the form that is aligned with meaning, the form that can be understood because it is, above all, in league with meaning. Why then, once more, this geometer’s privilege? Assuming, in the last analysis, that beauty lets itself be espoused or exhausted by the geometer, is he not, in the case of the sublime—and Corneille is said to be sublime—forced to commit an act of violence? Further, for the sake of determining an essential “Corneillean movement,” does one not lose what counts? Everything that defies a geometrical-mechanical framework—and not only the pieces which cannot be constrained by curves and helices, not only force and quality, which are meaning itself, but also duration, that which is pure qualitative

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heterogeneity within movement—is reduced to the appearance of the inessential for the sake of this essentialism or teleological structuralism. Rousset understands theatrical or novelistic movement as Aristotle understood movement in general: transition to the act, which itself is the repose of the desired form. Everything transpires as if everything within the dynamics of Corneillean meaning, and within each of Corneille’s plays, came to life with the aim of final peace, the peace of the structural energeia: Polyeucte. Outside this peace, before and after it, movement, in its pure duration, in the labor of its organization, can itself be only sketch or debris. Or even debauch, a fault or sin as compared to Polyeucte, the “first impeccable success.” Under the word “impeccable,” Rousset notes: “Cinna still sins in this respect” (p. 12). Preformationism, teleologism, reduction of force, value and duration—these are as one with geometrism, creating structure. This is the actual structure which governs, to one degree or another, all the essays in this book. Everything which, in the first Marivaux, does not announce the schema of the “double register” (narration and look at the narration) is “a series of youthful novelistic exercises” by which “he prepares not only the novels of maturity, but also his dramatic works” (p. 47). “The true Marivaux is still almost absent from it” [my italics]. “From our perspective, there is only one fact to retain . . .” (ibid.). There follows an analysis and a citation upon which is concluded: “This outline of a dialogue above the heads of the characters, through a broken-off narration in which the presence and the absence of the author alternate, is the outline of the veritable Marivaux. . . . Thus is sketched, in a first and rudimentary form, the properly Marivauldian combination of spectacle and spectator, perceived and perceiver. We will see it perfect itself ” (p. 48). The difficulties accumulate, as do our reservations, when Rousset specifies that this “permanent structure of Marivaux’s,”49 although invisible or latent in the works of his youth, “belongs,” as the “willful dissolution of novelistic illusion,” to the “burlesque tradition” (p. 50; cf. also p. 60). Marivaux’s originality, which “retains” from this tradition only “the free construction of a narration which simultaneously shows the work of the author and the author’s reflection on his work,” is then “critical consciousness” (p. 51). Marivaux’s idiom is not to be found in the structure described but in the intention that animates a

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traditional form and creates a new structure. The truth of the general structure thus restored does not describe the Marivauldian organism along its own lines. And less so its force. Yet: “The structural fact thus described—the double register—appears as a constant. . . . At the same time [my italics] it corresponds to the knowledge that Marivauldian man has of himself: a ‘heart’ without vision, caught in the field of a consciousness which itself is only vision” (p. 64). But how can a “structural fact,” traditional during this era (assuming that as it is defined, it is determined and original enough to belong to an era) “correspond” to the consciousness of “Marivauldian man”? Does the structure correspond to Marivaux’s most singular intention? Is Marivaux not, rather, a good example—and it would have to be demonstrated why he is a good example—of a literary structure of the times and, through it, an example of a structure of the era itself? Are there not here a thousand unresolved methodological problems that are the prerequisites for a single structural study, a monograph on an author or a work? If geometrism is especially apparent in the essays on Corneille and Marivaux, preformationism triumphs à propos of Proust and Claudel. And this time in a form that is more organicist than topographical. It is here too, that preformationism is most fruitful and convincing. First, because it permits the mastering of a richer subject matter, penetrated more from within. (May we be permitted to remark that we feel that what is best about this book is not due to its method, but to the quality of the attention given to its objects?) Further, because Proust’s and Claudel’s aesthetics are profoundly aligned with Rousset’s. For Proust himself and the demonstration given leaves no doubt on this subject, if one still had any—the demands of structure were constant and conscious, manifesting themselves through marvels of (neither true nor false) symmetry, recurrence, circularity, light thrown backward, superimposition (without adequation) of the first and the last, etc. Teleology here is not a product of the critic’s projection, but is the author’s own theme. The implication of the end in the beginning, the strange relationships between the subject who writes the book and the subject of this book, between the consciousness of the narrator and that of the hero—all this recalls the style of becoming and the dialectic of the “we” in the Phenomenology of the Mind.50 We are indeed concerned

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with the phenomenology of a mind here: “One can discern still more reasons for the importance attached by Proust to this circular form of a novel whose end returns to its beginning. In the final pages one sees the hero and the narrator unite too, after a long march during which each sought after the other, sometimes very close to each other, sometimes very far apart; they coincide at the moment of resolution, which is the instant when the hero becomes the narrator, that is, the author of his own history. The narrator is the hero revealed to himself, is the person that the hero, throughout his history, desires to be but never can be; he now takes the place of this hero and will be able to set himself to the task of edifying the work which has ended, and first to the task of writing Combray, which is the origin of the narrator as well as of the hero. The end of the book makes its existence possible and comprehensible. The novel is conceived such that its end engenders its beginning” (p. 144). Proust’s aesthetics and critical method are, ultimately, not outside his work but are the very heart of his creation: “Proust will make this aesthetic into the real subject of his work” (p. 135). As in Hegel, the philosophical, critical, reflective consciousness is not only contained in the scrutiny given to the operations and works of history. What is first in question is the history of this consciousness itself. It would not be deceptive to say that this aesthetic, as a concept of the work in general, exactly overlaps Rousset’s. And this aesthetic is indeed, if I may say so, a practiced preformationism: “The last chapter of the last volume,” Proust notes, “was written immediately after the first chapter of the first volume. Everything in between was written afterward.” By preformationism we indeed mean preformationism: the wellknown biological doctrine, opposed to epigenesis, according to which the totality of hereditary characteristics is enveloped in the germ, and is already in action in reduced dimensions that nevertheless respect the forms and proportions of the future adult. A theory of encasement was at the center of preformationism which today makes us smile. But what are we smiling at? At the adult in miniature, doubtless, but also at the attributing of something more than finality to natural life—providence in action and art conscious of its works. But when one is concerned with an art that does not imitate nature, when the artist is a man, and when it is consciousness that engenders, preformationism no longer

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makes us smile. Logos spermatikos is in its proper element, is no longer an export, for it is an anthropomorphic concept. For example: after having brought to light the necessity of repetition in Proustian composition, Rousset writes: “Whatever one thinks of the device which introduces Un amour de Swann, it is quickly forgotten, so tight and organic is the liaison that connects the part to the whole. Once one has finished reading the Recherche, one perceives that the episode is not at all isolable; without it, the ensemble would be unintelligible. Un amour de Swann is a novel within a novel, a painting within a painting . . ., it brings to mind, not the stories within stories that so many seventeenth- or eighteenthcentury novelists encase in their narratives, but rather the inner stories that can be read the Vie de Marianne, in Balzac or Gide. At one of the entryways to his novel, Proust places a small convex mirror which reflects the novel in abbreviated form” (p. 146). The metaphor and operation of encasement impose themselves, even if they are finally replaced by a finer, more adequate image which, at bottom, signifies the same relationship of implication. A reflecting and representative kind of implication, this time. It is for these same reasons that Rousset’s aesthetic is aligned with Claudel’s. Moreover, Proust’s aesthetic is defined at the beginning of the essay on Claudel. And the affinities are evident, above and beyond all the differences. These affinities are assembled in the theme of “structural monotony”: “ ‘And thinking once more about the monotony of Vinteuil’s works, I explained to Albertine that great writers have created only a single work, or rather have refracted the same beauty that they bring to the world through diverse elements’ ” (p. 171). Claudel: “ ‘Le soulier de satin is Tête d’or in another form. It summarizes both Tête d’or and Partage de midi. It is even the conclusion of Partage de midi . . . ’ ” “ ‘A poet does hardly anything but develop a preestablished plan’ ” (p. 172). This aesthetic which neutralizes duration and force as the difference between the acorn and the oak, is not autonomously Proust’s or Claudel’s. It translates a metaphysics. Proust also calls “time in its pure state” the “atemporal” or the “eternal.” The truth of time is not temporal. Analogously (analogously only), time as irreversible succession, is, according to Claudel, only the phenomenon, the epidermis, the surface image of the essential truth of the universe as it is conceived

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and created by God. This truth is absolute simultaneity. Like God, Claudel, the creator and composer, “has a taste for things that exist together” (Art poétique).51 This metaphysical intention, in the last resort, validates, through a series of mediations, the entire essay on Proust and all the analyses devoted to the “fundamental scene of Claudel’s theater” (p. 183), the “pure state of the Claudelian structure” (p. 177) found in Partage de midi, and to the totality of this theater in which, as Claudel himself says, “time is manipulated like an accordion, for our pleasure” such that “hours last and days are passed over” (p. 181). We will not, of course, examine in and of themselves this metaphysics or theology of temporality. That the aesthetics they govern can be legitimately and fruitfully applied to the reading of Proust or Claudel is evident, for these are their aesthetics, daughter (or mother) of their metaphysics. It is also readily demonstrable that what is in question is the metaphysics implicit in all structuralism, or in every structuralist proposition. In particular, a structuralist reading, by its own activity, always presupposes and appeals to the theological simultaneity of the book, and considers itself deprived of the essential when this simultaneity is not accessible. Rousset: “In any event, reading, which is developed in duration, will have to make the work simultaneously present in all its parts in order to be global. . . . Similar to a ‘painting in movement,’ the book is revealed only in successive fragments. The task of the demanding reader consists in overturning this natural tendency of the book, so that it may present itself in its entirety to the mind’s scrutiny. The only complete reading is the one which transforms the book into a simultaneous network of reciprocal relationships: it is then that surprises emerge” (p. xiii). (What surprises? How can simultaneity hold surprises in store? Rather, it neutralizes the surprises of nonsimultaneity. Surprises emerge from the dialogue between the simultaneous and the nonsimultaneous. Which suffices to say that structural simultaneity itself serves to reassure.) Jean-Pierre Richard: “The difficulty of every structural account resides in that it must describe sequentially, successively, that which in fact exists all at once, simultaneously” (L’univers imaginaire de Mallarmé, p. 28). Thus, Rousset invokes the difficulty of gaining access to the simultaneity which is truth within reading, and Richard the difficulty of accounting for it

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within writing. In both cases, simultaneity is the myth of a total reading or description, promoted to the status of a regulatory ideal. The search for the simultaneous explains the capacity to be fascinated by the spatial image: is space not “the order of coexistences” (Leibniz)? But by saying “simultaneity” instead of space, one attempts to concentrate time instead of forgetting it. “Duration thus takes on the illusory form of a homogeneous milieu, and the union between these two terms, space and duration, is simultaneity, which could be defined as the intersection of time with space.”52 In this demand for the flat and the horizontal, what is intolerable for structuralism is indeed the richness implied by the volume, every element of signification that cannot be spread out into the simultaneity of a form. But is it by chance that the book is, first and foremost, volume?53 And that the meaning of meaning (in the general sense of meaning and not in the sense of signalization) is infinite implication, the indefinite referral of signifier to signifier? And that its force is a certain pure and infinite equivocality which gives signified meaning no respite, no rest, but engages it in its own economy so that it always signifies again and differs? Except in the Livre irréalisé by Mallarmé, that which is written is never identical to itself. Unrealized: this does not mean that Mallarmé did not succeed in realizing a Book which would be at one with itself—he simply did not want to. He unrealized the unity of the Book by making the categories in which it was supposed to be securely conceptualized tremble: while speaking of an “identification with itself” of the Book, he underlines that the Book is at once “the same and other,” as it is “made up of itself.” It lends itself not only to a “double interpretation,” but through it, says Mallarmé, “I sow, so to speak, this entire double volume here and there ten times.”54 Does one have the right to constitute this metaphysics or aesthetics so well adapted to Proust and Claudel as the general method of structuralism?55 This, however, is precisely what Rousset does, in the extent to which, as we have at least tried to demonstrate, he decides that everything not intelligible in the light of a “preestablished” teleological framework, and not visible in its simultaneity, is reducible to the inconsequentiality of accident or dross. Even in the essays devoted to Proust and Claudel, the essays guided by the most comprehensive structure, Rousset must decide to consider as “genetic accidents” “each

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episode, each character” whose “eventual independence” from the “central theme” or “general organization of the work” is noticeable (p. 164); he must accept the confrontation of the “true Proust” with the “Novelist” to whom, moreover, he can sometimes “do wrong,” just as the true Proust, according to Rousset, is also capable of missing the “truth” of love, etc. (p. 166). In the same way that “the true Baudelaire is perhaps only in the Balcon, and all of Flaubert is in Madame Bovary” (p. xix), the true Proust is not simultaneously everywhere. Rousset must also conclude that the characters of l’Otage are severed not by “circumstance,” but, “to express it better,” by the “demands of the Claudelian framework” (p. 179); he must deploy marvels of subtlety to demonstrate that in Le soulier de satin Claudel does not “repudiate himself” and does not “renounce” his “constant framework” (p. 183). What is most serious is that this “ultrastructuralist” method, as we have called it, seems to contradict, in certain respects, the most precious and original intention of structuralism. In the biological and linguistic fields where it first appeared, structuralism above all insists upon preserving the coherence and completion of each totality at its own level. In a given configuration, it first prohibits the consideration of that which is incomplete or missing, everything that would make the configuration appear to be a blind anticipation of, or mysterious deviation from, an orthogenesis whose own conceptual basis would have to be a telos or an ideal norm. To be a structuralist is first to concentrate on the organization of meaning, on the autonomy and idiosyncratic balance, the completion of each moment, each form; and it is to refuse to relegate everything that is not comprehensible as an ideal type to the status of aberrational accident. The pathological itself is not the simple absence of structure. It is organized. It cannot be understood as the deficiency, defect, or decomposition of a beautiful, ideal totality. It is not the simple undoing of telos. It is true that the rejection of finalism is a rule, a methodological norm, that structuralism can apply only with difficulty. The rejection of finalism is a vow of infidelity to telos which the actual effort can never adhere to. Structuralism lives within and on the difference between its promise and its practice. Whether biology, linguistics, or literature is in question, how can an organized totality be perceived without reference to its end, or without presuming to know its end, at least? And if

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meaning is meaningful only within a totality, could it come forth if the totality were not animated by the anticipation of an end, or by an intentionality which, moreover, does not necessarily and primarily belong to a consciousness? If there are structures, they are possible only on the basis of the fundamental structure which permits totality to open and overflow itself such that it takes on meaning by anticipating a telos which here must be understood in its most indeterminate form. This opening is certainly that which liberates time and genesis (even coincides with them), but it is also that which risks enclosing progression toward the future—becoming—by giving it form. That which risks stifling force under form. It may be acknowledged, then, that in the rereading to which we are invited by Rousset, light is menaced from within by that which also metaphysically menaces every structuralism: the possibility of concealing meaning through the very act of uncovering it. To comprehend the structure of a becoming, the form of a force, is to lose meaning by finding it. The meaning of becoming and of force, by virtue of their pure, intrinsic characteristics, is the repose of the beginning and the end, the peacefulness of a spectacle, horizon or face.56 Within this peace and repose the character of becoming and of force is disturbed by meaning itself. The meaning of meaning is Apollonian by virtue of everything within it that can be seen.57 To say that force is the origin of the phenomenon is to say nothing. By its very articulation force becomes a phenomenon. Hegel demonstrated convincingly that the explication of a phenomenon by a force is a tautology.58 But in saying this, one must refer to language’s peculiar inability to emerge from itself in order to articulate its origin, and not to the thought of force. Force is the other of language without which language would not be what it is. In order to respect this strange movement within language, in order not to reduce it in turn, we would have to attempt a return to the metaphor of darkness and light (of self-revelation and selfconcealment), the founding metaphor of Western philosophy as metaphysics. The founding metaphor not only because it is a photological one—and in this respect the entire history of our philosophy is a photology, the name given to a history of, or treatise on, light—but because it is a metaphor. Metaphor in general, the passage from one existent to

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another, or from one signified meaning to another, authorized by the initial submission of Being to the existent, the analogical displacement of Being, is the essential weight which anchors discourse in metaphysics, irremediably repressing discourse into its metaphysical state.59 This is a fate which it would be foolish to term a regrettable and provisional accident of “history”—a slip, a mistake of thought occurring within history (in historia). In historiam, it is the fall of thought into philosophy which gets history under way. Which suffices to say that the metaphor of the “fall” deserves its quotation marks. In this heliocentric metaphysics, force, ceding its place to eidos (i.e., the form which is visible for the metaphorical eye), has already been separated from itself in acoustics.60 How can force or weakness be understood in terms of light and dark? That modern structuralism has grown and developed within a more or less direct and avowed dependence upon phenomenology suffices to make it a tributary of the most purely traditional stream of Western philosophy, which, above and beyond its anti-Platonism, leads Husserl back to Plato. Now, one would seek in vain a concept in phenomenology which would permit the conceptualization of intensity or force. The conceptualization not only of direction but of power, not only the in but the tension of intentionality. All value is first constituted by a theoretical subject. Nothing is gained or lost except in terms of clarity and nonclarity, obviousness, presence or absence for a consciousness, coming to awareness or loss of consciousness. Diaphanousness is the supreme value; as is univocity. Hence the difficulties in thinking the genesis and pure temporality of the transcendental ego, of accounting for the successful or unsuccessful incarnation of telos, and the mysterious failures called crises. And when, in certain places, Husserl ceases to consider the phenomena of crisis and the failure of telos as “accidents of genesis,” or as the inessential (Unwesen), it is in order to demonstrate that forgetting is eidetically dictated, and is necessary, under the rubric of “sedimentation,” for the development of truth. For the revealing and illumination of truth. But why these forces and failures of consciousness? And why the force of weakness which dissimulates in the very act by which it reveals? If this “dialectic” of force and weakness is the finitude of thought itself in its relationship to Being, it can only be articulated in the language of form, through images of shadow and

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light. For force is not darkness, and it is not hidden under a form for which it would serve as substance, matter, or crypt. Force cannot be conceived on the basis of an oppositional couple, that is, on the basis of the complicity between phenomenology and occultism. Nor can it be conceived, from within phenomenology, as the fact opposed to meaning. Emanicipation from this language must be attempted. But not as an attempt at emancipation from it, for this is impossible unless we forget our history. Rather, as the dream of emancipation. Nor as emancipation from it, which would be meaningless and would deprive us of the light of meaning. Rather, as resistance to it, as far as is possible. In any event, we must not abandon ourselves to this language with the abandon which today characterizes the worst exhilaration of the most nuanced structural formalism. Criticism, if it is called upon to enter into explication and exchange with literary writing, some day will not have to wait for this resistance first to be organized into a “philosophy” which would govern some methodology of aesthetics whose principles criticism would receive. For philosophy, during its history, has been determined as the reflection of poetic inauguration. Conceived apart, it is the twilight of forces, that is, the sun-splashed morning in which images, forms, and phenomena speak; it is the morning of ideas and idols in which the relief of forces becomes repose, its depth flattened in the light as it stretches itself into horizontality. But the enterprise is hopeless if one muses on the fact that literary criticism has already been determined, knowingly or not, voluntarily or not, as the philosophy of literature. As such—that is to say, until it has purposely opened the strategic operation we spoke of above, which cannot simply be conceived under the authority of structuralism—criticism will have neither the means nor, more particularly, the motive for renouncing eurythmics, geometry, the privilege given to vision, the Apollonian ecstasy which “acts above all as a force stimulating the eye, so that it acquires the power of vision.”61 It will not be able to exceed itself to the point of embracing both force and the movement which displaces lines, nor to the point of embracing force as movement, as desire, for itself, and not as the accident or epiphany of lines. To the point of embracing it as writing. Hence the nostalgia, the melancholy, the fallen Dionysianism of

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which we spoke at the outset. Are we mistaken in perceiving it beneath the praise of structural and Claudelian “monotony” which closes Forme et Signification? We should conclude, but the debate is interminable. The divergence, the difference between Dionysus and Apollo, between ardor and structure, cannot be erased in history, for it is not in history. It too, in an unexpected sense, is an original structure: the opening of history, historicity itself. Difference does not simply belong either to history or to structure. If we must say, along with Schelling, that “all is but Dionysus,” we must know—and this is to write—that, like pure force, Dionysus is worked by difference. He sees and lets himself be seen. And tears out (his) eyes. For all eternity, he has had a relationship to his exterior, to visible form, to structure, as he does to his death. This is how he appears (to himself). “Not enough forms . . .,” said Flaubert. How is he to be understood? Does he wish to celebrate the other of form? the “too many things” which exceed and resist form? In praise of Dionysus? One is certain that this is not so. Flaubert, on the contrary, is sighing, “Alas! not enough forms.” A religion of the work as form. Moreover, the things for which we do not have enough forms are already phantoms of energy, “ideas” “larger than the plasticity of style.” In question is a point against Leconte de Lisle, an affectionate point, for Flaubert “likes that fellow a lot.”62 Nietzsche was not fooled: “Flaubert, a new edition of Pascal, but as an artist with this instinctive belief at heart: ‘Flaubert est toujours haïssable, l’homme n’est rien, l’oeuvre est tout.’ ”63 We would have to choose then, between writing and dance. Nietzsche recommends a dance of the pen in vain: “ . . . dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen—that one must learn how to write?”64 Flaubert was aware, and he was right, that writing cannot be thoroughly Dionysiac. “One can only think and write sitting down,” he said. Joyous anger of Nietzsche: “Here I have got you, you nihilist! A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come when you are walking have any value.”65 But Nietzsche was certain that the writer would never be upright;

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that writing is first and always something over which one bends. Better still when letters are no longer figures of fire in the heavens. Nietzsche was certain, but Zarathustra was positive: “Here do I sit and wait, old broken tables around me and also new half tables. When cometh mine hour?—The hour of my descent, of my down-going.”66 “Die Stunde meines Niederganges, Unterganges.” It will be necessary to descend, to work, to bend in order to engrave and carry the new Tables to the valleys, in order to read them and have them read. Writing is the outlet as the descent of meaning outside itself within itself: metaphor-for-others-aimed-at-others-here-and-now, metaphor as the possibility of others here-and-now, metaphor as metaphysics in which Being must hide itself if the other is to appear. Excavation within the other toward the other in which the same seeks its vein and the true gold of its phenomenon. Submission in which the same can always lose (itself). Niedergang, Untergang. But the same is nothing, is not (it)self before taking the risk of losing (itself). For the fraternal other is not first in the peace of what is called intersubjectivity, but in the work and the peril of inter-rogation; the other is not certain within the peace of the response in which two affirmations espouse each other, but is called up in the night by the excavating work of interrogation. Writing is the moment of this original Valley of the other within Being. The moment of depth as decay. Incidence and insistence of inscription. “Behold, here is a new table; but where are my brethren who will carry it with me to the valley and into hearts of flesh?”67

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2 COGITO AND THE HISTORY OF MADNESS The Instant of Decision is Madness (Kierkegaard) In any event this book was terribly daring. A transparent sheet separates it from madness. (Joyce, speaking of Ulysses)

These reflections have as their point of departure, as the title of this lecture1 clearly indicates, Michel Foucault’s book Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique.2 This book, admirable in so many respects, powerful in its breadth and style, is even more intimidating for me in that, having formerly had the good fortune to study under Michel Foucault, I retain the consciousness of an admiring and grateful disciple. Now, the disciple’s consciousness, when he starts, I would not say to dispute, but to engage in dialogue with the master or, better, to articulate the interminable and silent dialogue which made him into a disciple—this disciple’s consciousness is an unhappy consciousness. Starting to enter into dialogue in the world, that is, starting to answer back, he always feels “caught in the act,” like the “infant” who, by definition and as his

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name indicates, cannot speak and above all must not answer back. And when, as is the case here, the dialogue is in danger of being taken— incorrectly—as a challenge, the disciple knows that he alone finds himself already challenged by the master’s voice within him that precedes his own. He feels himself indefinitely challenged, or rejected or accused; as a disciple, he is challenged by the master who speaks within him and before him, to reproach him for making this challenge and to reject it in advance, having elaborated it before him; and having interiorized the master, he is also challenged by the disciple that he himself is. This interminable unhappiness of the disciple perhaps stems from the fact that he does not yet know—or is still concealing from himself— that the master, like real life, may always be absent. The disciple must break the glass, or better the mirror, the reflection, his infinite speculation on the master. And start to speak. As the route that these considerations will follow is neither direct nor unilinear—far from it—I will sacrifice any further preamble and go straight to the most general questions that will serve as the focal points of these reflections. General questions that will have to be determined and specified along the way, many of which, most, will remain open. My point of departure might appear slight and artificial. In this 673page book, Michel Foucault devotes three pages—and, moreover, in a kind of prologue to his second chapter—to a certain passage from the first of Descartes’s Meditations. In this passage madness, folly, dementia, insanity seem, I emphasize seem, dismissed, excluded, and ostracized from the circle of philosophical dignity, denied entry to the philosopher’s city, denied the right to philosophical consideration, ordered away from the bench as soon as summoned to it by Descartes—this last tribunal of a Cogito that, by its essence, could not possibly be mad. In alleging—correctly or incorrectly, as will be determined—that the sense of Foucault’s entire project can be pinpointed in these few allusive and somewhat enigmatic pages, and that the reading of Descartes and the Cartesian Cogito proposed to us engages in its problematic the totality of this History of Madness as regards both its intention and its feasibility, I shall therefore be asking myself, in two series of questions, the following: 1. First, and in some ways this is a prejudicial question: is the interpretation of Descartes’s intention that is proposed to us justifiable? What

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I here call interpretation is a certain passage, a certain semantic relationship proposed by Foucault between, on the one hand, what Descartes said—or what he is believed to have said or meant—and on the other hand, let us say, with intentional vagueness for the moment, a certain “historical structure,” as it is called, a certain meaningful historical totality, a total historical project through which we think what Descartes said—or what he is believed to have said or meant—can particularly be demonstrated. In asking if the interpretation is justifiable, I am therefore asking about two things, putting two preliminary questions into one: (a) Have we fully understood the sign itself, in itself? In other words, has what Descartes said and meant been clearly perceived? This comprehension of the sign in and of itself, in its immediate materiality as a sign, if I may so call it, is only the first moment but also the indispensable condition of all hermeneutics and of any claim to transition from the sign to the signified. When one attempts, in a general way, to pass from an obvious to a latent language, one must first be rigorously sure of the obvious meaning.3 The analyst, for example, must first speak the same language as the patient. (b) Second implication of the first question: once understood as a sign, does Descartes’s stated intention have with the total historical structure to which it is to be related the relationship assigned to it? Does it have the historical meaning assigned to it? “Does it have the historical meaning assigned to it?” That is, again, two questions in one: Does it have the historical meaning assigned to it? does it have this meaning, a given meaning Foucault assigns to it? Or, second, does it have the historical meaning assigned to it? Is this meaning exhausted by its historicity? In other words, is it fully, in each and every one of its aspects, historical, in the classical sense of the word? 2. Second series of questions (and here we shall go somewhat beyond the case of Descartes, beyond the case of the Cartesian Cogito, which will be examined no longer in and of itself but as the index of a more general problematic): in the light of the rereading of the Cartesian Cogito that we shall be led to propose (or rather to recall, for, let it be said at the outset, this will in some ways be the most classical, banal reading, even if not the easiest one), will it not be possible to interrogate certain philosophical and methodological presuppositions of this history of madness? Certain ones only, for Foucault’s enterprise is too rich, branches out in too many directions to be preceded by a method

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or even by a philosophy, in the traditional sense of the word. And if it is true, as Foucault says, as he admits by citing Pascal, that one cannot speak of madness except in relation to that “other form of madness” that allows men “not to be mad,” that is, except in relation to reason,4 it will perhaps be possible not to add anything whatsoever to what Foucault has said, but perhaps only to repeat once more, on the site of this division between reason and madness of which Foucault speaks so well, the meaning, a meaning of the Cogito or (plural) Cogitos (for the Cogito of the Cartesian variety is neither the first nor the last form of Cogito); and also to determine that what is in question here is an experience which, at its furthest reaches, is perhaps no less adventurous, perilous, nocturnal, and pathetic than the experience of madness, and is, I believe, much less adverse to and accusatory of madness, that is, accusative and objectifying of it, than Foucault seems to think. As a first stage, we will attempt a commentary, and will accompany or follow as faithfully as possible Foucault’s intentions in reinscribing an interpretation of the Cartesian Cogito within the total framework of the History of Madness. What should then become apparent in the course of this first stage is the meaning of the Cartesian Cogito as read by Foucault. To this end, it is necessary to recall the general plan of the book and to open several marginal questions, destined to remain open and marginal. In writing a history of madness, Foucault has attempted—and this is the greatest merit, but also the very infeasibility of his book—to write a history of madness itself. Itself. Of madness itself. That is, by letting madness speak for itself. Foucault wanted madness to be the subject of his book in every sense of the word: its theme and its first-person narrator, its author, madness speaking about itself. Foucault wanted to write a history of madness itself, that is madness speaking on the basis of its own experience and under its own authority, and not a history of madness described from within the language of reason, the language of psychiatry on madness—the agonistic and rhetorical dimensions of the preposition on overlapping here—on madness already crushed beneath psychiatry, dominated, beaten to the ground, interned, that is to say, madness made into an object and exiled as the other of a language and a historical meaning which have been confused with logos itself. “A

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history not of psychiatry,” Foucault says, “but of madness itself, in its most vibrant state, before being captured by knowledge.” It is a question, therefore, of escaping the trap or objectivist naiveté that would consist in writing a history of untamed madness, of madness as it carries itself and breathes before being caught and paralyzed in the nets of classical reason, from within the very language of classical reason itself, utilizing the concepts that were the historical instruments of the capture of madness—the restrained and restraining language of reason. Foucault’s determination to avoid this trap is constant. It is the most audacious and seductive aspect of his venture, producing its admirable tension. But it is also, with all seriousness, the maddest aspect of his project. And it is remarkable that this obstinate determination to avoid the trap—that is, the trap set by classical reason to catch madness and which can now catch Foucault as he attempts to write a history of madness itself without repeating the aggression of rationalism—this determination to bypass reason is expressed in two ways difficult to reconcile at first glance. Which is to say that it is expressed uneasily. Sometimes Foucault globally rejects the language of reason, which itself is the language of order (that is to say, simultaneously the language of the system of objectivity, of the universal rationality of which psychiatry wishes to be the expression, and the language of the body politic—the right to citizenship in the philosopher’s city overlapping here with the right to citizenship anywhere, the philosophical realm functioning, within the unity of a certain structure, as the metaphor or the metaphysics of the political realm). At these moments he writes sentences of this type (he has just evoked the broken dialogue between reason and madness at the end of the eighteenth century, a break that was finalized by the annexation of the totality of language—and of the right to language—by psychiatric reason as the delegate of societal and governmental reason; madness has been stifled): “The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason on madness, could be established only on the basis of such a silence. I have not tried to write the history of that language but, rather, the archaeology of that silence.”5 And throughout the book runs the theme linking madness to silence, to “words without language” or “without the voice of a subject,” “obstinate murmur of a language that speaks by itself, without

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speaker or interlocutor, piled up upon itself, strangulated, collapsing before reaching the stage of formulation, quietly returning to the silence from which it never departed. The calcinated root of meaning.” The history of madness itself is therefore the archaeology of a silence. But, first of all, is there a history of silence? Further, is not an archaeology, even of silence, a logic, that is, an organized language, a project, an order, a sentence, a syntax, a work?6 Would not the archaeology of silence be the most efficacious and subtle restoration, the repetition, in the most irreducibly ambiguous meaning of the word, of the act perpetrated against madness—and be so at the very moment when this act is denounced? Without taking into account that all the signs which allegedly serve as indices of the origin of this silence and of this stifled speech, and as indices of everything that has made madness an interrupted and forbidden, that is, arrested, discourse—all these signs and documents are borrowed, without exception, from the juridical province of interdiction. Hence, one can inquire—as Foucault does also, at moments other than those when he contrives to speak of silence (although in too lateral and implicit a fashion from my point of view)—about the source and the status of the language of this archaeology, of this language which is to be understood by a reason that is not classical reason. What is the historical responsibility of this logic of archaeology? Where should it be situated? Does it suffice to stack the tools of psychiatry neatly, inside a tightly shut workshop, in order to return to innocence and to end all complicity with the rational or political order which keeps madness captive? The psychiatrist is but the delegate of this order, one delegate among others. Perhaps it does not suffice to imprison or to exile the delegate, or to stifle him; and perhaps it does not suffice to deny oneself the conceptual material of psychiatry in order to exculpate one’s own language. All our European languages, the language of everything that has participated, from near or far, in the adventure of Western reason—all this is the immense delegation of the project defined by Foucault under the rubric of the capture or objectification of madness. Nothing within this language, and no one among those who speak it, can escape the historical guilt—if there is one, and if it is historical in a classical sense—which Foucault apparently wishes to put on trial. But such a trial may be impossible, for by the simple fact of

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their articulation the proceedings and the verdict unceasingly reiterate the crime. If the Order of which we are speaking is so powerful, if its power is unique of its kind, this is so precisely by virtue of the universal, structural, universal, and infinite complicity in which it compromises all those who understand it in its own language, even when this language provides them with the form of their own denunciation. Order is then denounced within order. Total disengagement from the totality of the historical language responsible for the exile of madness, liberation from this language in order to write the archaeology of silence, would be possible in only two ways. Either do not mention a certain silence (a certain silence which, again, can be determined only within a language and an order that will preserve this silence from contamination by any given muteness), or follow the madman down the road of his exile. The misfortune of the mad, the interminable misfortune of their silence, is that their best spokesmen are those who betray them best; which is to say that when one attempts to convey their silence itself, one has already passed over to the side of the enemy, the side of order, even if one fights against order from within it, putting its origin into question. There is no Trojan horse unconquerable by Reason (in general). The unsurpassable, unique, and imperial grandeur of the order of reason, that which makes it not just another actual order or structure (a determined historical structure, one structure among other possible ones), is that one cannot speak out against it except by being for it, that one can protest it only from within it; and within its domain, Reason leaves us only the recourse to strategems and strategies. The revolution against reason, in the historical form of classical reason (but the latter is only a determined example of Reason in general. And because of this oneness of Reason the expression “history of reason” is difficult to conceptualize, as is also, consequently, a “history of madness”), the revolution against reason can be made only within it, in accordance with a Hegelian law to which I myself was very sensitive in Foucault’s book, despite the absence of any precise reference to Hegel. Since the revolution against reason, from the moment it is articulated, can operate only within reason, it always has the limited scope of what is called, precisely in the language of a department of internal affairs, a disturbance. A history, that

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is, an archaeology against reason doubtless cannot be written, for, despite all appearances to the contrary, the concept of history has always been a rational one. It is the meaning of “history” or archia that should have been questioned first, perhaps. A writing that exceeds, by questioning them, the values “origin,” “reason,” and “history” could not be contained within the metaphysical closure of an archaeology. As Foucault is the first to be conscious—and acutely so—of this daring, of the necessity of speaking and of drawing his language from the wellspring of a reason more profound than the reason which issued forth during the classical age, and as he experiences a necessity of speaking which must escape the objectivist project of classical reason—a necessity of speaking even at the price of a war declared by the language of reason against itself, a war in which language would recapture itself, destroy itself, or unceasingly revive the act of its own destruction—the allegation of an archaeology of silence, a purist, intransigent, nonviolent, nondialectical allegation, is often counterbalanced, equilibrated, I should even say contradicted by a discourse in Foucault’s book that is not only the admission of a difficulty, but the formulation of another project, a project that is not an expediency, but a different and more ambitious one, a project more effectively ambitious than the first one. The admission of the difficulty can be found in sentences such as these, among others, which I simply cite, in order not to deprive you of their dense beauty: “The perception that seeks to grasp them [in question are the miseries and murmurings of madness] in their wild state, necessarily belongs to a world that has already captured them. The liberty of madness can be understood only from high in the fortress that holds madness prisoner. And there madness possesses only the morose sum of its prison experiences, its mute experience of persecution, and we—we possess only its description as a man wanted.” And, later, Foucault speaks of a madness “whose wild state can never be restored in and of itself” and of an “inaccessible primitive purity.” Because this difficulty, or this impossibility, must reverberate within the language used to describe this history of madness, Foucault, in effect, acknowledges the necessity of maintaining his discourse within what he calls a “relativity without recourse,” that is, without support from an absolute reason or logos. The simultaneous necessity and

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impossibility of what Foucault elsewhere calls “a language without support,” that is to say, a language declining, in principle if not in fact, to articulate itself along the lines of the syntax of reason. In principle if not in fact, but here the fact cannot easily be put between parentheses. The fact of language is probably the only fact ultimately to resist all parenthization. “There, in the simple problem of articulation,” Foucault says later, “was hidden and expressed the major difficulty of the enterprise.” One could perhaps say that the resolution of this difficulty is practiced rather than formulated. By necessity. I mean that the silence of madness is not said, cannot be said in the logos of this book, but is indirectly, metaphorically, made present by its pathos—taking this word in its best sense. A new and radical praise of folly whose intentions cannot be admitted because the praise [éloge] of silence always takes place within logos,7 the language of objectification. “To speak well of madness” would be to annex it once more, especially when, as is the case here, “speaking well of” is also the wisdom and happiness of eloquent speech. Now, to state the difficulty, to state the difficulty of stating, is not yet to surmount it—quite the contrary. First, it is not to say in which language, through the agency of what speech, the difficulty is stated. Who perceives, who enunciates the difficulty? These efforts can be made neither in the wild and inaccessible silence of madness, nor simply in the language of the jailer, that is, in the language of classical reason, but only in the language of someone for whom is meaningful and before whom appears the dialogue or war or misunderstanding or confrontation or double monologue that opposes reason and madness during the classical age. And thereby we can envision the historic liberation of a logos in which the two monologues, or the broken dialogue, or especially the breaking point of the dialogue between a determined reason and a determined madness, could be produced and can today be understood and enunciated. (Supposing that they can be; but here we are assuming Foucault’s hypothesis.) Therefore, if Foucault’s book, despite all the acknowledged impossibilities and difficulties, was capable of being written, we have the right to ask what, in the last resort, supports this language without recourse or support: who enunciates the possibility of nonrecourse? Who wrote

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and who is to understand, in what language and from what historical situation of logos, who wrote and who is to understand this history of madness? For it is not by chance that such a project could take shape today. Without forgetting, quite to the contrary, the audacity of Foucault’s act in the History of Madness, we must assume that a certain liberation of madness has gotten underway, that psychiatry has opened itself up, however minimally, and that the concept of madness as unreason, if it ever had a unity, has been dislocated. And that a project such as Foucault’s can find its historical origin and passageway in the opening produced by this dislocation. If Foucault, more than anyone else, is attentive and sensitive to these kinds of questions, it nevertheless appears that he does not acknowledge their quality of being prerequisite methodological or philosophical considerations. And it is true that once the question and the privileged difficulty are understood, to devote a preliminary work to them would have entailed the sterilization or paralysis of all further inquiry. Inquiry can prove through its very act that the movement of a discourse on madness is possible. But is not the foundation of this possibility still too classical? Foucault’s book is not one of those that abandons itself to the prospective lightheartedness of inquiry. That is why, behind the admission of the difficulty concerning the archaeology of silence, a different project must be discerned, one which perhaps contradicts the projected archaeology of silence. Because the silence whose archaeology is to be undertaken is not an original muteness or nondiscourse, but a subsequent silence, a discourse arrested by command, the issue is therefore to reach the origin of the protectionism imposed by a reason that insists upon being sheltered, and that also insists upon providing itself with protective barriers against madness, thereby making itself into a barrier against madness; and to reach this origin from within a logos of free trade, that is, from within a logos that preceded the split of reason and madness, a logos which within itself permitted dialogue between what were later called reason and madness (unreason), permitted their free circulation and exchange, just as the medieval city permitted the free circulation of the mad within itself. The issue is therefore to reach the point at which the dialogue was broken off, dividing itself into two soliloquies—what

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Foucault calls, using a very strong word, the Decision. The Decision, through a single act, links and separates reason and madness, and it must be understood at once both as the original act of an order, a fiat, a decree, and as a schism, a caesura, a separation, a dissection. I would prefer dissension, to underline that in question is a self-dividing action, a cleavage and torment interior to meaning in general, interior to logos in general, a divison within the very act of sentire. As always, the dissension is internal. The exterior (is) the interior, is the fission that produces and divides it along the lines of the Hegelian Entzweiung. It thus seems that the project of convoking the first dissension of logos against itself is quite another project than the archaeology of silence, and raises different questions. This time it would be necessary to exhume the virgin and unitary ground upon which the decisive act linking and separating madness and reason obscurely took root. The reason and madness of the classical age had a common root. But this common root, which is a logos, this unitary foundation is much more ancient than the medieval period, brilliantly but briefly evoked by Foucault in his very fine opening chapter. There must be a founding unity that already carries within it the “free trade” of the Middle Ages, and this unity is already the unity of a logos, that is, of a reason; an already historical reason certainly, but a reason much less determined than it will be in its so-called classical form, having not yet received the determinations of the “classical age.” It is within the element of this archaic reason that the dissection, the dissension, will present itself as a modification or, if you will, as an overturning, that is, a revolution but an internal revolution, a revolution affecting the self, occurring within the self. For this logos which is in the beginning, is not only the common ground of all dissension, but also—and no less importantly— the very atmosphere in which Foucault’s language moves, the atmosphere in which a history of madness during the classical age not only appears in fact but is also by all rights stipulated and specified in terms of its limits. In order to account simultaneously for the origin (or the possibility) of the decision and for the origin (or the possibility) of its narration, it might have been necessary to start by reflecting this original logos in which the violence of the classical era played itself out. This history of logos before the Middle Ages and before the classical age is not, if this need be said at all, a nocturnal and mute prehistory.

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Whatever the momentary break, if there is one, of the Middle Ages with the Greek tradition, this break and this alteration are late and secondary developments as concerns the fundamental permanence of the logico-philosophical heritage. That the embedding of the decision in its true historical grounds has been left in the shadows by Foucault is bothersome, and for at least two reasons: 1. It is bothersome because at the outset Foucault makes a somewhat enigmatic allusion to the Greek logos, saying that, unlike classical reason, it “had no contrary.” To cite Foucault: “The Greeks had a relation to something that they called hybris. This relation was not merely one of condemnation; the existence of Thrasymacus or of Callicles suffices to prove it, even if their language has reached us already enveloped in the reassuring dialectic of Socrates. But the Greek Logos had no contrary.”8 [One would have to assume, then, that the Greek logos had no contrary, which is to say, briefly, that the Greeks were in the greatest proximity to the elementary, primordial, and undivided Logos with respect to which contradiction in general, all wars or polemics, could only be ulterior developments. This hypothesis forces us to admit, as Foucault above all does not, that the history and lineage of the “reassuring dialectic of Socrates” in their totality had already fallen outside and been exiled from this Greek logos that had no contrary. For if the Socratic dialectic is reassuring, in the sense understood by Foucault, it is so only in that it has already expulsed, excluded, objectified or (curiously amounting to the same thing) assimilated and mastered as one of its moments, “enveloped” the contrary of reason; and also only in that it has tranquilized and reassured itself into a pre-Cartesian certainty, a sophrosyne, a wisdom, a reasonable good sense and prudence. Consequently, it must be either (a) that the Socratic moment and its entire posterity immediately partake in the Greek logos that has no contrary; and that consequently, the Socratic dialectic could not be reassuring (we may soon have occasion to show that it is no more reassuring than the Cartesian cogito). In this case, in this hypothesis, the fascination with the pre-Socratics to which we have been provoked by Nietzsche, then by Heidegger and several others, would carry with it a share of mystification whose historico-philosophical motivations

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remain to be examined. Or (b) that the Socratic moment and the victory over the Calliclesian hybris already are the marks of a deportation and an exile of logos from itself, the wounds left in it by a decision, a difference; and then the structure of exclusion which Foucault wishes to describe in his book could not have been born with classical reason. It would have to have been consummated and reassured and smoothed over throughout all the centuries of philosophy. It would be essential to the entirety of the history of philosophy and of reason. In this regard, the classical age could have neither specificity nor privilege. And all the signs assembled by Foucault under the chapter heading Stultifera navis would play themselves out only on the surface of a chronic dissension. The free circulation of the mad, besides the fact that it is not as simply free as all that, would only be a socioeconomic epiphenomenon on the surface of a reason divided against itself since the dawn of its Greek origin. What seems to me sure in any case, regardless of the hypothesis one chooses concerning what is doubtless only a false problem and a false alternative, is that Foucault cannot simultaneously save the affirmation of a reassuring dialectic of Socrates and his postulation of a specificity of the classical age whose reason would reassure itself by excluding its contrary, that is, by constituting its contrary as an object in order to be protected from it and be rid of it. In order to lock it up. The attempt to write the history of the decision, division, difference runs the risk of construing the division as an event or a structure subsequent to the unity of an original presence, thereby confirming metaphysics in its fundamental operation. Truthfully, for one or the other of these hypotheses to be true and for there to be a real choice between them, it must be assumed in general that reason can have a contrary, that there can be an other of reason, that reason itself can construct or discover, and that the opposition of reason to its other is symmetrical. This is the heart of the matter. Permit me to hold off on this question. However one interprets the situation of classical reason, notably as regards the Greek logos (and whether or not this latter experienced dissension) in all cases a doctrine of tradition, of the tradition of logos (is there any other?) seems to be the prerequisite implied by Foucault’s enterprise. No matter what the relationship of the Greeks to hybris, a relationship that was certainly not simple . . . (Here, I wish to open a

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parenthesis and a question: in the name of what invariable meaning of “madness” does Foucault associate, whatever the meaning of this association, Madness and Hybris? A problem of translation, a philosophical problem of translation is posed—and it is serious—even if Hybris is not Madness for Foucault. The determination of their difference supposes a hazardous linguistic transition. The frequent imprudence of translators in this respect should make us very wary. I am thinking in particular, and in passing, of what is translated by madness and fury in the Philebus (45e).9 Further, if madness has an invariable meaning, what is the relation of this meaning to the a posteriori events which govern Foucault’s analysis? For, despite everything, even if his method is not empiricist, Foucault proceeds by inquiry and inquest. What he is writing is a history, and the recourse to events, in the last resort, is indispensable and determining, at least in principle. Now, is not the concept of madness—never submitted to a thematic scrutiny by Foucault—today a false and disintegrated concept, outside current and popular language which always lags longer than it should behind its subversion by science and philosophy? Foucault, in rejecting the psychiatric or philosophical material that has always emprisoned the mad, winds up employing—inevitably—a popular and equivocal notion of madness, taken from an unverifiable source. This would not be serious if Foucault used the word only in quotation marks, as if it were the language of others, of those who, during the period under study, used it as a historical instrument. But everything transpires as if Foucault knew what “madness” means. Everything transpires as if, in a continuous and underlying way, an assured and rigorous precomprehension of the concept of madness, or at least of its nominal definition, were possible and acquired. In fact, however, it could be demonstrated that as Foucault intends it, if not as intended by the historical current he is studying, the concept of madness overlaps everything that can be put under the rubric of negativity. One can imagine the kind of problems posed by such a usage of the notion of madness. The same kind of questions could be posed concerning the notion of truth that runs throughout the book . . . I close this long parenthesis.) Thus, whatever the relation of the Greeks to hybris, and of Socrates to the original logos, it is in any event certain that classical reason, and medieval reason before it, bore a relation to Greek reason, and that it is within the

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milieu of this more or less immediately perceived heritage, which itself is more or less crossed with other traditional lines, that the adventure or misadventure of classical reason developed. If dissension dates from Socrates, then the situation of the madman in the Socratic and postSocratic worlds—assuming that there is, then, something that can be called mad—perhaps deserves to be examined first. Without this examination, and as Foucault does not proceed in a simply aprioristic fashion, his historical description poses the banal but inevitable problems of periodization and of geographical, political, ethnological limitation, etc. If, on the contrary, the unopposed and unexcluding unity of logos were maintained until the classical “crisis,” then this latter is, if I may say so, secondary and derivative. It does not engage the entirety of reason. And in this case, even if stated in passing, Socratic discourse would be nothing less than reassuring. It can be proposed that the classical crisis developed from and within the elementary tradition of a logos that has no opposite but carries within itself and says all determined contradictions. This doctrine of the tradition of meaning and of reason would be even further necessitated by the fact that it alone can give meaning and rationality in general to Foucault’s discourse and to any discourse on the war between reason and unreason. For these discourses intend above all to be understood.] 2. I stated above that leaving the history of the preclassical logos in the shadows is bothersome for two reasons. The second reason, which I will adduce briefly before going on to Descartes, has to do with the profound link established by Foucault between the division, the dissension, and the possibility of history itself. “The necessity of madness, throughout the history of the West, is linked to the deciding gesture which detaches from the background noise, and from its continuous monotony, a meaningful language that is transmitted and consummated in time; briefly, it is linked to the possibility of history.” Consequently, if the decision through which reason constitutes itself by excluding and objectifying the free subjectivity of madness is indeed the origin of history, if it is historicity itself, the condition of meaning and of language, the condition of the tradition of meaning, the condition of the work in general, if the structure of exclusion is the fundamental structure of historicity, then the “classical” moment of this exclusion described by Foucault has neither absolute privilege nor

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archetypal exemplarity. It is an example as sample and not as model. In any event, in order to evoke the singularity of the classical moment, which is profound, perhaps it would be necessary to underline, not the aspects in which it is a structure of exclusion, but those aspects in which, and especially for what end, its own structure of exclusion is historically distinguished from the others, from all others. And to pose the problem of its exemplarity: are we concerned with an example among others or with a “good example,” an example that is revelatory by privilege? Formidable and infinitely difficult problems that haunt Foucault’s book, more present in his intentions than his words. Finally, a last question: if this great division is the possibility of history itself, the historicity of history, what does it mean, here, “to write the history of this division”? To write the history of historicity? To write the history of the origin of history? The hysteron proteron would not here be a simple “logical fallacy,” a fallacy within logic, within an established rationality. And its denunciation is not an act of ratiocination. If there is a historicity proper to reason in general, the history of reason cannot be the history of its origin (which, for a start, demands the historicity of reason in general), but must be that of one of its determined figures. This second project, which would devote all its efforts to discovering the common root of meaning and nonmeaning and to unearthing the original logos in which a language and a silence are divided from one another is not at all an expediency as concerns everything that could come under the heading “archaeology of silence,” the archaeology which simultaneously claims to say madness itself and renounces this claim. The expression “to say madness itself” is self-contradictory. To say madness without expelling it into objectivity is to let it say itself. But madness is what by essence cannot be said: it is the “absence of the work,” as Foucault profoundly says. Thus, not an expediency, but a different and more ambitious design, one that should lead to a praise of reason (there is no praise [éloge], by essence, except of reason),10 but this time of a reason more profound than that which opposes and determines itself in a historically determined conflict. Hegel again, always . . . Not an expediency, but a more ambitious ambition, even if Foucault writes this: “Lacking this inaccessible primitive purity [of madness itself], a structural study must go

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back toward the decision that simultaneously links and separates reason and madness; it must aim to uncover the perpetual exchange, the obscure common root, the original confrontation that gives meaning to the unity, as well as to the opposition, of sense and non-sense” [my italics]. Before describing the moment when the reason of the classical age will reduce madness to silence by what he calls a “strange act of force,” Foucault shows how the exclusion and internment of madness found a sort of structural niche prepared for it by the history of another exclusion: the exclusion of leprosy. Unfortunately, we cannot be detained by the brilliant passages of the chapter entitled Stultifera navis. They would also pose numerous questions. We thus come to the “act of force,” to the great internment which, with the creation of the houses of internment for the mad and others in the middle of the seventeenth century, marks the advent and first stage of a classical process described by Foucault throughout his book. Without establishing, moreover, whether an event such as the creation of a house of internment is a sign among others, whether it is a fundamental symptom or a cause. This kind of question could appear exterior to a method that presents itself precisely as structuralist, that is, a method for which everything within the structural totality is interdependent and circular in such a way that the classical problems of causality themselves would appear to stem from a misunderstanding. Perhaps. But I wonder whether, when one is concerned with history (and Foucault wants to write a history), a strict structuralism is possible, and, especially, whether, if only for the sake of order and within the order of its own descriptions, such a study can avoid all etiological questions, all questions bearing, shall we say, on the center of gravity of the structure. The legitimate renunciation of a certain style of causality perhaps does not give one the right to renounce all etiological demands. The passage devoted to Descartes opens the crucial chapter on “the great internment.” It thus opens the book itself, and its location at the beginning of the chapter is fairly unexpected. More than anywhere else, the question I have just asked seems to me unavoidable here. We are not told whether or not this passage of the first Meditation, interpreted by Foucault as a philosophical internment of madness, is destined,

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as a prelude to the historical and sociopolitical drama, to set the tone for the entire drama to be played. Is this “act of force,” described in the dimension of theoretical knowledge and metaphysics, a symptom, a cause, a language? What must be assumed or elucidated so that the meaning of this question or dissociation can be neutralized? And if this act of force has a structural affinity with the totality of the drama, what is the status of this affinity? Finally, whatever the place reserved for philosophy in this total historical structure may be, why the sole choice of the Cartesian example? What is the exemplarity of Descartes, while so many other philosophers of the same era were interested or—no less significantly—not interested in madness in various ways? Foucault does not respond directly to any of these more than methodological questions, summarily, but inevitably, invoked. A single sentence, in his preface, settles the question. To cite Foucault: “To write the history of madness thus will mean the execution of a structural study of an historical ensemble—notions, institutions, juridical and police measures, scientific concepts—which holds captive a madness whose wild state can never in itself be restored.” How are these elements organized in the “historical ensemble”? What is a “notion”? Do philosophical notions have a privilege? How are they related to scientific concepts? A quantity of questions that besiege this enterprise. I do not know to what extent Foucault would agree that the prerequisite for a response to such questions is first of all the internal and autonomous analysis of the philosophical content of philosophical discourse. Only when the totality of this content will have become manifest in its meaning for me (but this is impossible) will I rigorously be able to situate it in its total historical form. It is only then that its reinsertion will not do it violence, that there will be a legitimate reinsertion of this philosophical meaning itself. As to Descartes in particular, no historical question about him—about the latent historical meaning of his discourse, about its place in a total structure—can be answered before a rigorous and exhaustive internal analysis of his manifest intentions, of the manifest meaning of his philosophical discourse has been made. We will now turn to this manifest meaning, this properly philosophical intention that is not legible in the immediacy of a first encounter. But first by reading over Foucault’s shoulder.

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writing and difference There had to be folly so that wisdom might overcome it. (Herder)

Descartes, then, is alleged to have executed the act of force in the first of the Meditations, and it would very summarily consist in a summary expulsion of the possibility of madness from thought itself. I shall first cite the decisive passage from Descartes, the one cited by Foucault. Then we shall follow Foucault’s reading of the text. Finally, we shall establish a dialogue between Descartes and Foucault. Descartes writes the following (at the moment when he undertakes to rid himself of all the opinions in which he had hitherto believed, and to start all over again from the foundations: a primis fundamentis. To do so, it will suffice to ruin the ancient foundations without being obliged to submit all his opinions to doubt one by one, for the ruin of the foundations brings down the entire edifice. One of these fragile foundations of knowledge, the most naturally apparent, is sensation. The senses deceive me sometimes; they can thus deceive me all the time, and I will therefore submit to doubt all knowledge whose origin is in sensation): “All that up to the present time I have accepted as most true and certain I have learned either from the senses or through the senses; but it is sometimes proved to me that these senses are deceptive, and it is wiser not to trust entirely to any thing by which we have once been deceived.” Descartes starts a new paragraph. “But . . .” (sed forte . . . I insist upon the forte which the Duc de Luynes left untranslated, an omission that Descartes did not deem necessary to correct when he went over the translation. It is better, as Baillet says, to compare “the French with the Latin” when reading the Meditations. It is only in the second French edition by Clerselier that the sed forte is given its full weight and is translated by “but yet perhaps . . . ” The importance of this point will soon be demonstrated.) Pursuing my citation: “But it may be that although the senses sometimes deceive us concerning things which are hardly perceptible, or very far away, there are yet many others to be met with as to which we cannot reasonably have any doubt . . .” [my italics]. There would be, there would perhaps be data of sensory origin which cannot reasonably be doubted. “And how could I deny that these hands and this body are mine, were it not perhaps that

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I compare myself to certain persons, devoid of sense, whose cerebella are so troubled and clouded by the violent vapours of black bile, that they constantly assure us that they think they are kings when they are really quite poor, or that they are clothed in purple when they are really without covering, or who imagine that they have an earthenware head or are nothing but pumpkins or are made of glass . . .” And now the most significant sentence in Foucault’s eyes: “But they are mad, sed amentes sunt isti, and I should not be any the less insane (demens) were I to follow examples so extravagant.”11 I interrupt my citation not at the end of this paragraph, but on the first words of the following paragraph, which reinscribe the lines I have just read in a rhetorical and pedagogical movement with highly compressed articulations. These first words are Praeclare sane . . . Also translated as toutefois [but at the same time—trans.]. And this is the beginning of a paragraph in which Descartes imagines that he can always dream, and that the world might be no more real than his dreams. And he generalizes by hyperbole the hypothesis of sleep and dream (“Now let us assume that we are asleep . . .” ); this hypothesis and this hyperbole will serve in the elaboration of doubt founded on natural reasons (for there is also a hyperbolical moment of this doubt), beyond whose reach will be only the truths of nonsensory origin, mathematical truths notably, which are true “whether I am awake or asleep” and which will capitulate only to the artificial and metaphysical assault of the evil genius. How does Foucault read this text? According to Foucault, Descartes, encountering madness alongside (the expression alongside is Foucault’s) dreams and all forms of sensory error, refuses to accord them all the same treatment, so to speak. “In the economy of doubt,” says Foucault, “there is a fundamental imbalance between madness, on the one hand, and error, on the other . . .” (I note in passing that elsewhere Foucault often denounces the classical reduction of madness to error.) He pursues: “Descartes does not avoid the peril of madness in the same way he circumvents the eventuality of dream and error.” Foucault establishes a parallelism between the following two procedures: 1. The one by which Descartes wishes to demonstrate that the

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senses can deceive us only regarding “things which are hardly perceptible, or very far away. These would be the limits of the error of sensory origin. And in the passage I just read, Descartes did say: “But it may be that although the senses sometimes deceive us concerning things which are hardly perceptible, or very far away, there are yet many others to be met with as to which we cannot reasonably have any doubt . . .” Unless one is mad, a hypothesis seemingly excluded in principle by Descartes in the same passage. 2. The procedure by which Descartes shows that imagination and dreams cannot themselves create the simple and universal elements which enter into their creations, as, for example, “corporeal nature in general, and its extension, the figure of extended things, their quantity or magnitude and number,”12 that is, everything which precisely is not of sensory origin, thereby constituting the objects of mathematics and geometry, which themselves are invulnerable to natural doubt. It is thus tempting to believe, along with Foucault, that Descartes wishes to find in the analysis (taking this word in its strict sense) of dreams and sensation a nucleus, an element of proximity and simplicity irreducible to doubt. It is in dreams and in sensory perception that I surmount or, as Foucault says, that I “circumvent” doubt and reconquer a basis of certainty. Foucault writes thus: “Descartes does not avoid the peril of madness in the same way he circumvents the eventuality of dreams or of error. . . . Neither image-peopled sleep, nor the clear consciousness that the senses can be deceived is able to take doubt to the extreme point of its universality; let us admit that our eyes deceive us, ‘let us assume that we are asleep’—truth will not entirely slip out into the night. For madness, it is otherwise.” Later: “In the economy of doubt, there is an imbalance between madness, on the one hand, and dream and error, on the other. Their situation in relation to the truth and to him who seeks it is different; dreams or illusions are surmounted within the structure of truth; but madness is inadmissible for the doubting subject.” It indeed appears, then, that Descartes does not delve into the experience of madness as he delves into the experience of dreams, that is, to the point of reaching an irreducible nucleus which nonetheless would be interior to madness itself. Descartes is not interested in

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madness, he does not welcome it as a hypothesis, he does not consider it. He excludes it by decree. I would be insane if I thought that I had a body made of glass. But this is excluded, since I am thinking. Anticipating the moment of the Cogito, which will have to await the completion of numerous stages, highly rigorous in their succession, Foucault writes: “impossibility of being mad that is essential not to the object of thought, but to the thinking subject.” Madness is expelled, rejected, denounced in its very impossibility from the very interiority of thought itself. Foucault is the first, to my knowledge, to have isolated delirium and madness from sensation and dreams in this first Meditation. The first to have isolated them in their philosophical sense and their methodological function. Such is the originality of his reading. But if the classical interpreters did not deem this dissociation auspicious, is it because of their inattentiveness? Before answering this question, or rather before continuing to ask it, let us recall along with Foucault that this decree of inadmissibility which is a forerunner of the political decree of the great internment, or corresponds to it, translates it, or accompanies it, or in any case is in solidarity with it—this decree would have been impossible for a Montaigne, who was, as we know, haunted by the possibility of being mad, or of becoming completely mad in the very action of thought itself. The Cartesian decree therefore marks, says Foucault, “the advent of a ratio.” But as the advent of a ratio is not “exhausted” by “the progress of rationalism,” Foucault leaves Descartes there, to go on to the historical (politico-social) structure of which the Cartesian act is only a sign. For “more than one sign,” Foucault says, “betrays the classical event.” We have attempted to read Foucault. Let us now naïvely attempt to reread Descartes and, before repeating the question of the relationship between the “sign” and the “structure,” let us attempt to see, as I had earlier mentioned, what the sense of the sign itself may be. (Since the sign here already has the autonomy of a philosophical discourse, is already a relationship of signifier to signified.) In rereading Descartes, I notice two things: 1. That in the passage to which we have referred and which corresponds to the phase of doubt founded on natural reasons, Descartes does not circumvent the eventuality of sensory error or of dreams, and does not

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“surmount” them “within the structure of truth;” and all this for the simple reason that he apparently does not ever, nor in any way, surmount them or circumvent them, and does not ever set aside the possibility of total error for all knowledge gained from the senses or from imaginary constructions. It must be understood that the hypothesis of dreams is the radicalization or, if you will, the hyperbolical exaggeration of the hypothesis according to which the senses could sometimes deceive me. In dreams, the totality of sensory images is illusory. It follows that a certainty invulnerable to dreams would be a fortiori invulnerable to perceptual illusions of the sensory kind. It therefore suffices to examine the case of dreams in order to deal with, on the level which is ours for the moment, the case of natural doubt, of sensory error in general. Now, which are the certainties and truths that escape perception, and therefore also escape sensory error or imaginative and oneiric composition? They are certainties and truths of a nonsensory and nonimaginative origin. They are simple and intelligible things. In effect, if I am asleep, everything I perceive while dreaming may be, as Descartes says, “false and illusory,” particularly the existence of my hands and my body and the actions of opening my eyes, moving my head, etc. In other words, what was previously excluded, according to Foucault, as insanity, is admissible within dreams. And we will see why in a moment. But, says Descartes, let us suppose that all my oneirical representations are illusory. Even in this case, there must be some representations of things as naturally certain as the body, hands, etc., however illusory this representation may be, and however false its relation to that which it represents. Now, within these representations, these images, these ideas in the Cartesian sense, everything may be fictitious and false, as in the representations of those painters whose imaginations, as Descartes expressly says, are “extravagant” enough to invent something so new that its like has never been seen before. But in the case of painting, at least, there is a final element which cannot be analyzed as illusion, an element that painters cannot counterfeit: color. This is only an analogy, for Descartes does not posit the necessary existence of color in general: color is an object of the senses among others. But, just as there always remains in a painting, however inventive and imaginative it may be, an irreducibly simple and real element—color— similarly, there is in dreams an element of noncounterfeit simplicity

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presupposed by all fantastical compositions and irreducible to all analysis. But this time—and this is why the example of the painter and of color was only an analogy—this element is neither sensory nor imaginative: it is intelligible. Foucault does not concern himself with this point. Let me cite the passage from Descartes that concerns us here: For, as a matter of fact, painters, even when they study with the greatest skill to represent sirens and satyrs by forms the most strange and extraordinary, cannot give them natures which are entirely new, but merely make a certain medley of the members of different animals; or if their imagination is extravagant enough to invent something so novel that nothing similar has ever before been seen, and that then their work represents a thing purely fictitious and absolutely false, it is certain all the same that the colours of which this is composed are necessarily real. And for the same reason, although these general things, to wit, a body, eyes, a head, hands, and such like, may be imaginary, we are bound at the same time to confess that there are at least some other objects yet more simple and more universal, which are real and true; and of these just in the same way as with certain real colours, all these images of things which dwell in our thoughts, whether true and real or false and fantastic, are formed. To such a class of things pertains corporeal nature in general, and its extension, the figure of extended things, their quantity or magnitude and number, as also the place in which they are, the time which measures their duration, and so on. That is possibly why our reasoning is not unjust when we conclude from this that Physics, Astronomy, Medicine and all other sciences which have as their end the consideration of composite things, are very dubious and uncertain; but that Arithmetic, Geometry and other sciences of that kind which only treat of things that are very simple and very general, without taking great trouble to ascertain whether they are actually existent or not, contain some measure of certainty and an element of the indubitable. For whether I am awake or asleep, two and three together always form five, and the square can never have more than four sides, and it does not seem possible that truths so clear and apparent can be suspected of any falsity.13

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And I remark that the following paragraph also starts with a “nevertheless” (verumtamen) which will soon be brought to our attention. Thus the certainty of this simplicity of intelligible generalization— which is soon after submitted to metaphysical, artificial, and hyperbolical doubt through the fiction of the evil genius—is in no way obtained by a continuous reduction which finally lays bare the resistance of a nucleus of sensory or imaginative certainty. There is discontinuity and a transition to another order of reasoning. The nucleus is purely intelligible, and the still natural and provisional certainty which has been attained supposes a radical break with the senses. At this moment of the analysis, no imaginative or sensory signification, as such, has been saved, no invulnerability of the senses to doubt has been experienced. All significations or “ideas” of sensory origin are excluded from the realm of truth, for the same reason as madness is excluded from it. And there is nothing astonishing about this: madness is only a particular case, and, moreover, not the most serious one, of the sensory illusion which interests Descartes at this point. It can thus be stated that: 2. The hypothesis of insanity—at this moment of the Cartesian order—seems neither to receive any privileged treatment nor to be submitted to any particular exclusion. Let us reread, in effect, the passage cited by Foucault in which insanity appears. Let us resituate it. Descartes has just remarked that since the senses sometimes deceive us, “it is wiser not to trust entirely to any thing by which we have once been deceived.”14 He then starts a new paragraph with the sed forte which I brought to your attention a few moments ago. Now, the entire paragraph which follows does not express Descartes’s final, definitive conclusions, but rather the astonishment and objections of the nonphilosopher, of the novice in philosophy who is frightened by this doubt and protests, saying: I am willing to let you doubt certain sensory perceptions concerning “things which are hardly perceptible, or very far away,” but the others! that you are in this place, sitting by the fire, speaking thus, this paper in your hands and other seeming certainties! Descartes then assumes the astonishment of this reader or naïve interlocutor, pretends to take him into account when he writes: “And how could I deny that these hands and this body are mine, were it not perhaps that I compare myself to certain persons, devoid of sense,

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whose . . . and I should not be any the less insane were I to follow examples so extravagant.” The pedagogical and rhetorical sense of the sed forte which governs this paragraph is clear. It is the “but perhaps” of the feigned objection. Descartes has just said that all knowledge of sensory origin could deceive him. He pretends to put to himself the astonished objection of an imaginary nonphilosopher who is frightened by such audacity and says: no, not all sensory knowledge, for then you would be mad and it would be unreasonable to follow the example of madmen, to put forth the ideas of madmen. Descartes echoes this objection: since I am here, writing, and you understand me, I am not mad, nor are you, and we are all sane. The example of madness is therefore not indicative of the fragility of the sensory idea. So be it. Descartes acquiesces to this natural point of view, or rather he feigns to rest in this natural comfort in order better, more radically and more definitively, to unsettle himself from it and to discomfort his interlocutor. So be it, he says, you think that I would be mad to doubt that I am sitting near the fire, etc., that I would be insane to follow the example of madmen. I will therefore propose a hypothesis which will seem much more natural to you, will not disorient you, because it concerns a more common, and more universal experience than that of madness: the experience of sleep and dreams. Descartes then elaborates the hypothesis that will ruin all the sensory foundations of knowledge and will lay bare only the intellectual foundations of certainty. This hypothesis above all will not run from the possibility of an insanity—an epistemological one—much more serious than madness. The reference to dreams is therefore not put off to one side—quite the contrary—in relation to a madness potentially respected or even excluded by Descartes. It constitutes, in the methodical order which here is ours, the hyperbolical exasperation of the hypothesis of madness. This latter affected only certain areas of sensory perception, and in a contingent and partial way. Moreover, Descartes is concerned here not with determining the concept of madness but with utilizing the popular notion of insanity for juridical and methodological ends, in order to ask questions of principle regarding only the truth of ideas.15 What must be grasped here is that from this point of view the sleeper, or the dreamer, is madder than the madman. Or, at least, the dreamer, insofar

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as concerns the problem of knowledge which interests Descartes here, is further from true perception than the madman. It is in the case of sleep, and not in that of insanity, that the absolute totality of ideas of sensory origin becomes suspect, is stripped of “objective value” as M. Guéroult puts it. The hypothesis of insanity is therefore not a good example, a revelatory example, a good instrument of doubt—and for at least two reasons. (a) It does not cover the totality of the field of sensory perception. The madman is not always wrong about everything; he is not wrong often enough, is never mad enough. (b) It is not a useful or happy example pedagogically, because it meets the resistance of the nonphilosopher who does not have the audacity to follow the philosopher when the latter agrees that he might indeed be mad at the very moment when he speaks. Let us turn to Foucault once more. Confronted with the situation of the Cartesian text whose principles I have just indicated, Foucault could—and this time I am only extending the logic of his book without basing what I say on any particular text—Foucault could recall two truths that on a second reading would justify his interpretations, which would then only apparently differ from the interpretation I have just proposed. 1. It appears, on this second reading, that, for Descartes, madness is thought of only as a single case—and not the most serious one—among all cases of sensory error. (Foucault would then assume the perspective of the factual determination of the concept of madness by Descartes, and not his juridical usage of it.) Madness is only a sensory and corporeal fault, a bit more serious than the fault which threatens all waking but normal men, and much less serious, within the epistemological order, than the fault to which we succumb in dreams. Foucault would then doubtless ask whether this reduction of madness to an example, to a case of sensory error, does not constitute an exclusion, an internment of madness, and whether it is not above all a sheltering of the Cogito and everything relative to the intellect and reason from madness. If madness is only a perversion of the senses—or of the imagination—it is corporeal, in alliance with the body. The real distinction of substances expels madness to the outer shadows of the Cogito. Madness, to use an expression proposed elsewhere by Foucault, is confined to the interior of the exterior and to the exterior of the interior. It is the other of the

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Cogito. I cannot be mad when I think and when I have clear and distinct ideas. 2. Or, while assuming our hypothesis, Foucault could also recall the following: Descartes, by inscribing his reference to madness within the problematic of knowledge, by making madness not only a thing of the body but an error of the body, by concerning himself with madness only as the modification of ideas, or the faculties of representation or judgment, intends to neutralize the originality of madness. He would even, in the long run, be condemned to construe it, like all errors, not only as an epistemological deficiency but also as a moral failure linked to a precipitation of the will; for will alone can consecrate the intellectual finitude of perception as error. It is only one step from here to making madness a sin, a step that was soon after cheerfully taken, as Foucault convincingly demonstrates in other chapters. Foucault would be perfectly correct in recalling these two truths to us if we were to remain at the naïve, natural, and premetaphysical stage of Descartes’s itinerary, the stage marked by natural doubt as it intervenes in the passage that Foucault cites. However, it seems that these two truths become vulnerable in turn, as soon as we come to the properly philosophical, metaphysical, and critical phase of doubt.16 Let us first notice how, in the rhetoric of the first Meditation, the first toutefois [at the same time] which announced the “natural” hyperbole of dreams (just after Descartes says, “But they are mad, and I should not be any the less insane,” etc.) is succeeded by a second toutefois [nevertheless] at the beginning of the next paragraph.17 To “at the same time,” marking the hyperbolical moment within natural doubt, will correspond a “nevertheless,” marking the absolutely hyperbolical moment which gets us out of natural doubt and leads to the hypothesis of the evil genius. Descartes has just admitted that arithmetic, geometry, and simple notions escape the first doubt, and he writes, “Nevertheless I have long had fixed in my mind the belief that an all-powerful God existed by whom I have been created such as I am.”18 This is the onset of the well-known movement leading to the fiction of the evil genius. Now, the recourse to the fiction of the evil genius will evoke, conjure up, the possibility of a total madness, a total derangement over which I could have no control because it is inflicted upon me— hypothetically—leaving me no responsibility for it. Total derangement

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is the possibility of a madness that is no longer a disorder of the body, of the object, the body-object outside the boundaries of the res cogitans, outside the boundaries of the policed city, secure in its existence as thinking subjectivity, but is a madness that will bring subversion to pure thought and to its purely intelligible objects, to the field of its clear and distinct ideas, to the realm of the mathematical truths which escape natural doubt. This time madness, insanity, will spare nothing, neither bodily nor purely intellectual perceptions. And Descartes successively judges admissible: (a) That which he pretended not to admit while conversing with the nonphilosopher. To cite Descartes (he has just evoked “some evil genius not less powerful than deceitful”): “I shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colours, figures, sound, and all other external things are nought but the illusions and dreams of which this genius has availed himself in order to lay traps for my credulity; I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses, yet falsely believing myself to possess all these things”19 These ideas will be taken up again in the second Meditiation. We are thus quite far from the dismissal of insanity made above. (b) That which escapes natural doubt: “But how do I know that Hell (i.e., the deceiving God, before the recourse to the evil genius) has not brought it to pass that . . . I am not deceived every time that I add two and three, or count the sides of a square. . . ?”20 Thus, ideas of neither sensory nor intellectual origin will be sheltered from this new phase of doubt, and everything that was previously set aside as insanity is now welcomed into the most essential interiority of thought. In question is a philosophical and juridical operation (but the first phase of doubt was already such) which no longer names madness and reveals all principled possibilities. In principle nothing is opposed to the subversion named insanity, although in fact and from a natural point of view, for Descartes, for his reader, and for us, no natural anxiety is possible regarding this actual subversion. (Truthfully speaking, to go to the heart of the matter, one would have to confront directly, in and of itself, the question of what is de facto and what de jure in the relations of the Cogito and madness.) Beneath this natural comfort, beneath this

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apparently prephilosophical confidence is hidden the recognition of an essential and principled truth: to wit, if discourse and philosophical communication (that is, language itself) are to have an intelligible meaning, that is to say, if they are to conform to their essence and vocation as discourse, they must simultaneously in fact and in principle escape madness. They must carry normality within themselves. And this is not a specifically Cartesian weakness (although Descartes never confronts the question of his own language),21 is not a defect or mystification linked to a determined historical structure, but rather is an essential and universal necessity from which no discourse can escape, for it belongs to the meaning of meaning. It is an essential necessity from which no discourse can escape, even the discourse which denounces a mystification or an act of force. And, paradoxically, what I am saying here is strictly Foucauldian. For we can now appreciate the profundity of the following affirmation of Foucault’s that curiously also saves Descartes from the accusations made against him: “Madness is the absence of a work.” This is a fundamental motif of Foucault’s book. Now, the work starts with the most elementary discourse, with the first articulation of a meaning, with the first syntactical usage of an “as such,”22 for to make a sentence is to manifest a possible meaning. By its essence, the sentence is normal. It carries normality within it, that is, sense, in every sense of the word—Descartes’s in particular. It carries normality and sense within it, and does so whatever the state, whatever the health or madness of him who propounds it, or whom it passes through, on whom, in whom it is articulated. In its most impoverished syntax, logos is reason and, indeed, a historical reason. And if madness in general, beyond any factitious and determined historical structure, is the absence of a work, then madness is indeed, essentially and generally, silence, stifled speech, within a caesura and a wound that open up life as historicity in general. Not a determined silence, imposed at one given moment rather than at any other, but a silence essentially linked to an act of force and a prohibition which open history and speech. In general. Within the dimension of historicity in general, which is to be confused neither with some ahistorical eternity, nor with an empirically determined moment of the history of facts, silence plays the irreducible role of that which bears and haunts language, outside and against which alone language can emerge—“against” here simultaneously

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designating the content from which form takes off by force, and the adversary against whom I assure and reassure myself by force. Although the silence of madness is the absence of a work, this silence is not simply the work’s epigraph, nor is it, as concerns language and meaning, outside the work. Like nonmeaning, silence is the work’s limit and profound resource. Of course, in essentializing madness this way one runs the risk of disintegrating the factual findings of psychiatric efforts. This is a permanent danger, but it should not discourage the demanding and patient psychiatrist. So that, to come back to Descartes, any philosopher or speaking subject (and the philosopher is but the speaking subject par excellence) who must evoke madness from the interior of thought (and not only from within the body or some other extrinsic agency), can do so only in the realm of the possible and in the language of fiction or the fiction of language. Thereby, through his own language, he reassures himself against any actual madness—which may sometimes appear quite talkative, another problem—and can keep his distance, the distance indispensable for continuing to speak and to live. But this is not a weakness or a search for security proper to a given historical language (for example, the search for certainty in the Cartesian style), but is rather inherent in the essence and very project of all language in general; and even in the language of those who are apparently the maddest; and even and above all in the language of those who, by their praise of madness, by their complicity with it, measure their own strength against the greatest possible proximity to madness. Language being the break with madness, it adheres more thoroughly to its essence and vocation, makes a cleaner break with madness, if it pits itself against madness more freely and gets closer and closer to it: to the point of being separated from it only by the “transparent sheet” of which Joyce speaks, that is, by itself—for this diaphaneity is nothing other than the language, meaning, possibility, and elementary discretion of a nothing that neutralizes everything. In this sense, I would be tempted to consider Foucault’s book a powerful gesture of protection and internment. A Cartesian gesture for the twentieth century. A reappropriation of negativity. To all appearances, it is reason that he interns, but, like Descartes, he chooses the reason of yesterday as his target and not the possibility of meaning in general.

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2. As for the second truth Foucault could have countered with, it too seems valid only during the natural phase of doubt. Descartes not only ceases to reject madness during the phase of radical doubt, he not only installs its possible menace at the very heart of the intelligible, he also in principle refuses to let any determined knowledge escape from madness. A menace to all knowledge, insanity—the hypothesis of insanity—is not an internal modification of knowledge. At no point will knowledge alone be able to dominate madness, to master it in order to objectify it—at least for as long as doubt remains unresolved. For the end of doubt poses a problem to which we shall return in a moment. The act of the Cogito and the certainty of existing indeed escape madness the first time; but aside from the fact that for the first time, it is no longer a question of objective, representative knowledge, it can no longer literally be said that the Cogito would escape madness because it keeps itself beyond the grasp of madness, or because, as Foucault says, “I who think, I cannot be mad”; the Cogito escapes madness only because at its own moment, under its own authority, it is valid even if I am mad, even if my thoughts are completely mad. There is a value and a meaning of the Cogito, as of existence, which escape the alternative of a determined madness or a determined reason. Confronted with the critical experience of the Cogito, insanity, as stated in the Discourse on Method, is irremediably on a plane with scepticism. Thought no longer fears madness: “ . . . remarking that this truth ‘I think, therefore I am’ was so certain and so assured that all the most extravagant suppositions brought forward by the sceptics were incapable of shaking it.”23 The certainty thus attained need not be sheltered from an emprisoned madness, for it is attained and ascertained within madness itself. It is valid even if I am mad—a supreme self-confidence that seems to require neither the exclusion nor the circumventing of madness. Descartes never interns madness, neither at the stage of natural doubt nor at the stage of metaphysical doubt. He only claims to exclude it during the first phase of the first stage, during the nonhyperbolical moment of natural doubt. The hyperbolical audacity of the Cartesian Cogito, its mad audacity, which we perhaps no longer perceive as such because, unlike Descartes’s contemporary, we are too well assured of ourselves and too well accustomed to the framework of the Cogito, rather than to the critical experience of it—its mad audacity would consist in the return to

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an original point which no longer belongs to either a determined reason or a determined unreason, no longer belongs to them as opposition or alternative. Whether I am mad or not, Cogito, sum. Madness is therefore, in every sense of the word, only one case of thought (within thought). It is therefore a question of drawing back toward a point at which all determined contradictions, in the form of given, factual historical structures, can appear, and appear as relative to this zero point at which determined meaning and nonmeaning come together in their common origin. From the point of view which here is ours, one could perhaps say the following about this zero point, determined by Descartes as Cogito. Invulnerable to all determined opposition between reason and unreason, it is the point starting from which the history of the determined forms of this opposition, this opened or broken-off dialogue, can appear as such and be stated. It is the impenetrable point of certainty in which the possibility of Foucault’s narration, as well as of the narration of the totality, or rather of all the determined forms of the exchanges between reason and madness are embedded. It is the point24 at which the project of thinking this totality by escaping it is embedded. By escaping it: that is to say, by exceeding the totality, which—within existence—is possible only in the direction of infinity or nothingness; for even if the totality of what I think is imbued with falsehood or madness, even if the totality of the world does not exist, even if nonmeaning has invaded the totality of the world, up to and including the very contents of my thought, I still think, I am while I think. Even if I do not in fact grasp the totality, if I neither understand nor embrace it, I still formulate the project of doing so, and this project is meaningful in such a way that it can be defined only in relation to a precomprehension of the infinite and undetermined totality. This is why, by virtue of this margin of the possible, the principled, and the meaningful, which exceeds all that is real, factual, and existent, this project is mad, and acknowledges madness as its liberty and its very possibility. This is why it is not human, in the sense of anthropological factuality, but is rather metaphysical and demonic: it first awakens to itself in its war with the demon, the evil genius of nonmeaning, by pitting itself against the strength of the evil genius, and by resisting him through reduction of the natural man within itself. In this sense,

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nothing is less reassuring than the Cogito at its proper and inaugural moment. The project of exceeding the totality of the world, as the totality of what I can think in general, is no more reassuring than the dialectic of Socrates when it, too, overflows the totality of beings, planting us in the light of a hidden sun which is epekeina tes ousias. And Glaucon was not mistaken when he cried out: “Lord! what demonic hyperbole? daimonias hyperboles,” which is perhaps banally translated as “marvelous transcendence.”25 This demonic hyperbole goes further than the passion of hybris, at least if this latter is seen only as the pathological modification of the being called man. Such a hybris keeps itself within the world. Assuming that it is deranged and excessive, it implies the fundamental derangement and excessiveness of the hyperbole which opens and founds the world as such by exceeding it. Hybris is excessive and exceeds only within the space opened by the demonic hyperbole. The extent to which doubt and the Cartesian Cogito are punctuated by this project of a singular and unprecedented excess—an excess in the direction of the nondetermined, Nothingness or Infinity, an excess which overflows the totality of that which can be thought, the totality of beings and determined meanings, the totality of factual history—is also the extent to which any effort to reduce this project, to enclose it within a determined historical structure, however comprehensive, risks missing the essential, risks dulling the point itself. Such an effort risks doing violence to this project in turn (for there is also a violence applicable to rationalists and to sense, to good sense; and this, perhaps, is what Foucault’s book definitely demonstrates, for the victims of whom he speaks are always the bearers of sense, the true bearers of the true and good sense hidden and oppressed by the determined “good sense” of the “division”—the “good sense” that never divides itself enough and is always determined too quickly)—risks doing it violence in turn, and a violence of a totalitarian and historicist style which eludes meaning and the origin of meaning.26 I use “totalitarian” in the structuralist sense of the word, but I am not sure that the two meanings do not beckon each other historically. Structuralist totalitariansim here would be responsible for an internment of the Cogito similar to the violences of the classical age. I am not saying that Foucault’s book is totalitarian, for at least at its outset it poses the question of the origin of historicity

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in general, thereby freeing itself of historicism; I am saying, however, that by virtue of the construction of his project he sometimes runs the risk of being totalitarian. Let me clarify: when I refer to the forced entry into the world of that which is not there and is supposed by the world, or when I state that the compelle intrare (epigraph of the chapter on “the great internment”) becomes violence itself when it turns toward the hyperbole in order to make hyperbole reenter the world, or when I say that this reduction to intraworldliness is the origin and very meaning of what is called violence, making possible all straitjackets, I am not invoking an other world, an alibi or an evasive transcendence. That would be yet another possibility of violence, a possibility that is, moreover, often the accomplice of the first one. I think, therefore, that (in Descartes) everything can be reduced to a determined historical totality except the hyperbolical project. Now, this project belongs to the narration narrating itself and not to the narration narrated by Foucault. It cannot be recounted, cannot be objectified as an event in a determined history. I am sure that within the movement which is called the Cartesian Cogito this hyperbolical extremity is not the only element that should be, like pure madness in general, silent. As soon as Descartes has reached this extremity, he seeks to reassure himself, to certify the Cogito through God, to identify the act of the Cogito with a reasonable reason. And he does so as soon as he proffers and reflects the Cogito. That is to say, he must temporalize the Cogito, which itself is valid only during the instant of intuition, the instant of thought being attentive to itself, at the point, the sharpest point, of the instant. And here one should be attentive to this link between the Cogito and the movement of temporalization. For if the Cogito is valid even for the maddest madman, one must, in fact, not be mad if one is to reflect it and retain it, if one is to communicate it and its meaning. And here, with the reference to God and to a certain memory,27 would begin the hurried repatriation of all mad and hyperbolical wanderings which now take shelter and are given reassurance within the order of reasons, in order once more to take possession of the truths they had left behind. Within Descartes’s text, at least, the internment takes place at this point. It is here that hyperbolical and mad wanderings once more become itinerary and method, “assured” and “resolute” progression through our existing

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world, which is given to us by God as terra firma. For, finally, it is God alone who, by permitting me to extirpate myself from a Cogito that at its proper moment can always remain a silent madness, also insures my representations and my cognitive determinations, that is, my discourse against madness. It is without doubt that, for Descartes, God alone28 protects me against the madness to which the Cogito, left to its own authority, could only open itself up in the most hospitable way. And Foucault’s reading seems to me powerful and illuminating not at the stage of the text which he cites, which is anterior and secondary to the Cogito, but from the moment which immediately succeeds the instantaneous experience of the Cogito at its most intense, when reason and madness have not yet been separated, when to take the part of the Cogito is neither to take the part of reason as reasonable order, nor the part of disorder and madness, but is rather to grasp, once more, the source which permits reason and madness to be determined and stated. Foucault’s interpretation seems to me illuminating from the moment when the Cogito must reflect and proffer itself in an organized philosophical discourse. That is, almost always. For if the Cogito is valid even for the madman, to be mad—if, once more, this expression has a singular philosophical meaning, which I do not believe: it simply says the other of each determined form of the logos—is not to be able to reflect and to say the Cogito, that is, not to be able to make the Cogito appear as such for an other; an other who may be myself. From the moment when Descartes pronounces the Cogito, he inscribes it in a system of deductions and protections that betray its wellspring and constrain the wandering that is proper to it so that error may be circumvented. At bottom, leaving in silence the problem of speech posed by the Cogito, Descartes seems to imply that thinking and saying what is clear and distinct are the same thing. One can say what one thinks and that one thinks without betraying one or the other. Analogously—analogously only—Saint Anselm saw in the insipiens, the insane man, someone who could not think because he could not think what he said. Madness was for him, too, a silence, the voluble silence of a thought that did not think its own words. This also is a point which must be developed further. In any event, the Cogito is a work as soon as it is assured of what it says. But before it is a work, it is madness. If the madman could rebuff the evil genius, he could not tell himself so. He therefore cannot

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say so. And in any event, Foucault is right in the extent to which the project of constraining any wandering already animated a doubt which was always proposed as methodical. This identification of the Cogito with reasonable—normal—reason need not even await—in fact, if not in principle—the proofs of the existence of a veracious God as the supreme protective barrier against madness. This identification intervenes from the moment when Descartes determines natural light (which in its undetermined source should be valid even for the mad), from the moment when he pulls himself out of madness by determining natural light through a series of principles and axioms (axiom of causality according to which there must be at least as much reality in the cause as in the effect; then, after this axiom permits the proof of the existence of God, the axioms that “the light of nature teaches us that fraud and deception necessarily proceed from some defect”).29 These dogmatically determined axioms escape doubt, are never even submitted to its scrutiny, are established only reciprocally, on the basis of the existence and truthfulness of God. Due to this fact, they fall within the province of the history of knowledge and the determined structures of philosophy. This is why the act of the Cogito, at the hyperbolical moment when it pits itself against madness, or rather lets itself be pitted against madness, must be repeated and distinguished from the language or the deductive system in which Descartes must inscribe it as soon as he proposes it for apprehension and communication, that is, as soon as he reflects the Cogito for the other, which means for oneself. It is through this relationship to the other as an other self that meaning reassures itself against madness and nonmeaning. And philosophy is perhaps the reassurance given against the anguish of being mad at the point of greatest proximity to madness. This silent and specific moment could be called pathetic. As for the functioning of the hyperbole in the structure of Descartes’s discourse and in the order of reasons, our reading is therefore, despite all appearances to the contrary, profoundly aligned with Foucault’s. It is indeed Descartes—and everything for which this name serves as an index—it is indeed the system of certainty that first of all functions in order to inspect, master, and limit hyperbole, and does so both by determining it in the ether of a natural light whose axioms are from the outset exempt from hyperbolical doubt, and by making of hyperbolical doubt a point of transition firmly maintained

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within the chain of reasons. But it is our belief that this movement can be described within its own time and place only if one has previously disengaged the extremity of hyperbole, which Foucault seemingly has not done. In the fugitive and, by its essence, ungraspable moment when it still escapes the linear order of reasons, the order of reason in general and the determinations of natural light, does not the Cartesian Cogito lend itself to repetition, up to a certain point, by the Husserlian Cogito and by the critique of Descartes implied in it? This would be an example only, for some day the dogmatic and historically determined grounds—ours—will be discovered, which the critique of Cartesian deductivism, the impetus and madness of the Husserlian reduction of the totality of the world, first had to rest on, and then had to fall onto in order to be stated. One could do for Husserl what Foucault has done for Descartes: demonstrate how the neturalization of the factual world is a neutralization (in the sense in which to neutralize is also to master, to reduce, to leave free in a straitjacket) of nonmeaning, the most subtle form of an act of force. And in truth, Husserl increasingly associated the theme of normality with the theme of the transcendental reduction. The embedding of transcendental phenomenology in the metaphysics of presence, the entire Husserlian thematic of the living present is the profound reassurance of the certainty of meaning. By separating, within the Cogito, on the one hand, hyperbole (which I maintain cannot be enclosed in a factual and determined historical structure, for it is the project of exceeding every finite and determined totality), and, on the other hand, that in Descartes’s philosophy (or in the philosophy supporting the Augustinian Cogito or the Husserlian Cogito as well) which belongs to a factual historical structure, I am not proposing the separation of the wheat from the tares in every philosophy in the name of some philosophia perennis. Indeed, it is exactly the contrary that I am proposing. In question is a way of accounting for the very historicity of philosophy. I believe that historicity in general would be impossible without a history of philosophy, and I believe that the latter would be impossible if we possessed only hyperbole, on the one hand, or, on the other, only determined historical structures, finite Weltanschauungen. The historicity proper to philosophy is located and constituted in the transition, the dialogue between hyperbole and the

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finite structure, between that which exceeds the totality and the closed totality, in the difference between history and historicity; that is, in the place where, or rather at the moment when, the Cogito and all that it symbolizes here (madness, derangement, hyperbole, etc.) pronounce and reassure themselves then to fall, necessarily forgetting themselves until their reactivation, their reawakening in another statement of the excess which also later will become another decline and another crisis. From its very first breath, speech, confined to this temporal rhythm of crisis and reawakening, is able to open the space for discourse only by emprisoning madness. This rhythm, moreover, is not an alternation that additionally would be temporal. It is rather the movement of temporalization itself as concerns that which unites it to the movement of logos. But this violent liberation of speech is possible and can be pursued only in the extent to which it keeps itself resolutely and consciously at the greatest possible proximity to the abuse that is the usage of speech—just close enough to say violence, to dialogue with itself as irreducible violence, and just far enough to live and live as speech. Due to this, crisis or oblivion perhaps is not an accident, but rather the destiny of speaking philosophy—the philosophy which lives only by emprisoning madness, but which would die as thought, and by a still worse violence, if a new speech did not at every instant liberate previous madness while enclosing within itself, in its present existence, the madman of the day. It is only by virtue of this oppression of madness that finite-thought, that is to say, history, can reign. Extending this truth to historicity in general, without keeping to a determined historical moment, one could say that the reign of finite thought can be established only on the basis of the more or less disguised internment, humiliation, fettering and mockery of the madman within us, of the madman who can only be the fool of a logos which is father, master, and king. But that is another discourse and another story. I will conclude by citing Foucault once more. Long after the passage on Descartes, some three hundred pages later, introducing Rameau’s Nephew Foucault writes, with a sigh of remorse: “In doubt’s confrontation with its major dangers, Descartes realized that he could not be mad—though he was to acknowledge for a long time to come that all the powers of unreason kept vigil around his thought.”30 What we have attempted to do here this evening is to situate ourselves within the interval of this

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remorse, Foucault’s remorse, Descartes’s remorse according to Foucault; and within the space of stating that, “though he was to acknowledge for a long time to come,” we have attempted not to extinguish the other light, a black and hardly natural light, the vigil of the “powers of unreason” around the Cogito. We have attempted to requite ourselves toward the gesture which Descartes uses to requite himself as concerns the menacing powers of madness which are the adverse origin of philosophy. Among all Foucault’s claims to my gratitude, there is thus also that of having made me better anticipate, more so by his monumental book than by the naïve reading of the Meditations, to what degree the philosophical act can no longer no longer be in memory of Cartesianism, if to be Cartesian, as Descartes himself doubtless understood it, is to attempt to be Cartesian. That is to say, as I have at least tried to demonstrate, to-attempt-to-say-the-demonic-hyperbole from whose heights thought is announced to itself, frightens itself, and reassures itself against being annihilated or wrecked in madness or in death. At its height hyperbole, the absolute opening, the uneconomic expenditure, is always reembraced by an economy and is overcome by economy. The relationship between reason, madness, and death is an economy, a structure of deferral whose irreducible originality must be respected. This attemptto-say-the-demonic-hyperbole is not an attempt among others; it is not an attempt which would occasionally and eventually be completed by the saying of it, or by its object, the direct object of a willful subjectivity. This attempt to say, which is not, moreover, the antagonist of silence, but rather the condition for it, is the original profoundity of will in general. Nothing, further, would be more incapable of regrasping this will than voluntarism, for, as finitude and as history, this attempt is also a first passion. It keeps within itself the trace of a violence. It is more written than said, it is economized. The economy of this writing is a regulated relationship between that which exceeds and the exceeded totality: the différance of the absolute excess. To define philosophy as the attempt-to-say-the-hyperbole is to confess—and philosophy is perhaps this gigantic confession—that by virtue of the historical enunciation through which philosophy tranquilizes itself and excludes madness, philosophy also betrays itself (or betrays itself as thought), enters into a crisis and a forgetting of itself

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that are an essential and necessary period of its movement. I philosophize only in terror, but in the confessed terror of going mad. The confession is simultaneously, at its present moment, oblivion and unveiling, protection and exposure: economy. But this crisis in which reason is madder than madness—for reason is nonmeaning and oblivion—and in which madness is more rational than reason, for it is closer to the wellspring of sense, however silent or murmuring—this crisis has always begun and is interminable. It suffices to say that, if it is classic, it is not so in the sense of the classical age but in the sense of eternal and essential classicism, and is also historical in an unexpected sense. And nowhere else and never before has the concept of crisis been able to enrich and reassemble all its potentialities, all the energy of its meaning, as much, perhaps, as in Michel Foucault’s book. Here, the crisis is on the one hand, in Husserl’s sense, the danger menacing reason and meaning under the rubric of objectivism, of the forgetting of origins, of the blanketing of origins by the rationalist and transcendental unveiling itself. Danger as the movement of reason menaced by its own security, etc. But the crisis is also decision, the caesura of which Foucault speaks, in the sense of krinein, the choice and division between the two ways separated by Parmenides in his poem, the way of logos and the nonway, the labyrinth, the palintrope in which logos is lost; the way of meaning and the way of nonmeaning; of Being and of non-Being. A division on whose basis, after which, logos, in the necessary violence of its irruption, is separated from itself as madness, is exiled from itself, forgetting its origin and its own possibility. Is not what is called finitude possibility as crisis? A certain identity between the consciousness of crisis and the forgetting of it? Of the thinking of negativity and the reduction of negativity? Crisis of reason, finally, access to reason and attack of reason. For what Michel Foucault teaches us to think is that there are crises of reason in strange complicity with what the world calls crises of madness.

3 EDMOND JABÈS AND THE QUESTION OF THE BOOK Our rereadings of Je bâtis ma demeure1 will be better, henceforth. A certain ivy could have hidden or absorbed its meaning, could have turned its meaning in on itself. Humor and games, laughter and dances, songs, circled graciously around a discourse which, as it did not yet love its true root, bent a bit in the wind. Did not yet stand upright in order to enunciate only the rigor and rigidity of poetic obligation. In Le livre des questions2 the voice has not been altered, nor the intention abandoned, but the accent is more serious. A powerful and ancient root is exhumed, and on it is laid bare an ageless wound (for what Jabès teaches us is that roots speak, that words want to grow, and that poetic discourse takes root in a wound): in question is a certain Judaism as the birth and passion of writing. The passion of writing, the love and endurance of the letter itself whose subject is not decidably the Jew or the Letter itself. Perhaps the common root of a people and of writing. In any event, the incommensurable destiny which grafts the history of a race born of the book (Livre des questions, p. 26)

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onto the radical origin of meaning as literality, that is, onto historicity itself. For there could be no history without the gravity and labor of literality. The painful folding of itself which permits history to reflect itself as it ciphers itself. This reflection is its beginning. The only thing that begins by reflecting itself is history. And this fold, this furrow, is the Jew. The Jew who elects writing which elects the Jew, in an exchange responsible for truth’s thorough suffusion with historicity and for history’s assignment of itself to its empiricity. difficulty of being a Jew, which coincides with the difficulty of writing; for Judaism and writing are but the same waiting, the same hope, the same depletion. (Ibid., p. 132)

The exchange between the Jew and writing as a pure and founding exchange, an exchange without prerogatives in which the original appeal is, in another sense of the word, a convocation—this is the most persistent affirmation of the Livre des questions: You are he who writes and is written.

...

And Reb Ilde: “What difference is there between choosing and being chosen when we can do nothing but submit to the choice?” (Ibid., p. 30)

And through a kind of silent displacement toward the essential which makes of this book one long metonymy, the situation of the Jew becomes exemplary of the situation of the poet, the man of speech and of writing. The poet, in the very experience of his freedom, finds himself both bound to language and delivered from it by a speech whose master, nonetheless, he himself is. Words choose the poet. . . . The art of the writer consists in little by little making words interest themselves in his books. ( Je bâtis ma demeure)

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In question is a labor, a deliverance, a slow gestation of the poet by the poem whose father he is. Little by little the book will finish me. (L’espace blanc)

The poet is thus indeed the subject of the book, its substance and its master, its servant and its theme. And the book is indeed the subject of the poet, the speaking and knowing being who in the book writes on the book. This movement through which the book, articulated by the voice of the poet, is folded and bound to itself, the movement through which the book becomes a subject in itself and for itself, is not critical or speculative reflection, but is, first of all, poetry and history. For in its representation of itself the subject is shattered and opened. Writing is itself written, but also ruined, made into an abyss, in its own representation. Thus, within this book, which infinitely reflects itself and which develops as a painful questioning of its own possibility, the form of the book represents itself: The novel of Sarah and Yukel, through various dialogues and meditations attributed to imaginary rabbis, is the story of a love destroyed by men and by words. It has the dimensions of a book and the bitter obstinacy of a wandering question. (Livre des questions, p. 26)

We will see that by another direction of metonymy—but to what extent is it other?—the Livre des questions describes the generation of God himself. The wisdom of the poet thus culminates its freedom in the passion of translating obedience to the law of the word into autonomy. Without which, and if passion becomes subjection, the poet is mad. The madman is the victim of the rebellion of words. (Je bâtis ma demeure)

Also, through his understanding of this assignment of the root, and through the inspiration he receives from this injunction of the Law, Jabès perhaps has renounced the verve, that is, the capriciousness of the early

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works; but he has in no way given up his freedom of speech. He has even acknowledged that freedom must belong to the earth, to the root, or it is merely wind: A teaching that Reb Zalé translated with this image: “You think that it is the bird who is free. You are deceived; it is the flower . . .” And Reb Lima: “Freedom is awakened little by little, in the extent to which we become aware of our ties, like the sleeper of his senses; then our acts finally have a name.” (Ibid., p. 124)

Freedom allies and exchanges itself with that which restrains it, with everything it receives from a buried origin, with the gravity which situates its center and its site. A site whose cult is not necessarily pagan. Provided that this Site is not a site, an enclosure, a place of exclusion, a province or a ghetto. When a Jew or a poet proclaims the Site, he is not declaring war. For this site, this land, calling to us from beyond memory, is always elsewhere. The site is not the empirical and national Here of a territory. It is immemorial, and thus also a future. Better: it is tradition as adventure. Freedom is granted to the nonpagan Land only if it is separated from freedom by the Desert of the Promise. That is, by the Poem. When it lets itself be articulated by poetic discourse, the Land always keeps itself beyond any proximity, illic: Yukel, you have always been ill at ease with yourself, you are never here, but elsewhere . . . (Ibid., p. 33) What are you dreaming of ?—The Land.—But you are on land.—I am dreaming of the Land where l will be.—But we are right in front of each other. And we have our feet on land.—I know only the stones of the way which leads, as it is said, to the Land.

The Poet and the Jew are not born here but elsewhere. They wander, separated from their true birth. Autochthons only of speech and writing, of Law. “Race born of the book” because sons of the Land to come. Autochthons of the Book. Autonomous too, as we said. Which

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assumes that the poet does not simply receive his speech and his law from God. Judaic heteronomy has no need of a poet’s intercession. Poetry is to prophecy what the idol is to truth. It is perhaps for this reason that in Jabès the poet and the Jew seem at once so united and disunited, and that the entire Livre des questions is also a self-justification addressed to the Jewish community which lives under heteronomy and to which the poet does not truly belong. Poetic autonomy, comparable to none other, presupposes broken Tables. And Reb Lima: Freedom, at first, was engraved ten times in the Tables of the Law, but we deserve it so little that the Prophet broke them in his anger. (Ibid., p. 124)

Between the fragments of the broken Tables the poem grows and the right to speech takes root. Once more begins the adventure of the text as weed, as outlaw far from “the fatherland of the Jews,” which is a “sacred text surrounded by commentaries” (p. 109). The necessity of commentary, like poetic necessity, is the very form of exiled speech. In the beginning is hermeneutics. But the shared necessity of exegesis, the interpretive imperative, is interpreted differently by the rabbi and the poet. The difference between the horizon of the original text and exegetic writing makes the difference between the rabbi and the poet irreducible. Forever unable to reunite with each other, yet so close to each other, how could they ever regain the realm? The original opening of interpretation essentially signifies that there will always be rabbis and poets. And two interpretations of interpretation.3 The Law then becomes Question and the right to speech coincides with the duty to interrogate. The book of man is a book of question. “To every question, the Jew answers with a question.” Reb Lema (Ibid., p. 125)

But if this right is absolute, it is because it does not depend upon some accident within history. The breaking of the Tables articulates, first of all, a rupture within God as the origin of history.4

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82 writing and difference Do not forget that you are the nucleus of a rupture. (Ibid., p. 137)

God separated himself from himself in order to let us speak, in order to astonish and to interrogate us. He did so not by speaking but by keeping still, by letting silence interrupt his voice and his signs, by letting the Tables be broken. In Exodus God repented and said so at least twice, before the first and before the new Tables, between original speech and writing and, within Scripture, between the origin and repetition (Exodus 32:14; 33:17). Writing is, thus, originally hermetic and secondary. Our writing, certainly, but already His, which starts with the stifling of his voice and the dissimulation of his Face. This difference, this negativity in God is our freedom, the transcendence and the verb which can relocate the purity of their negative origin only in the possibility of the Question. The question of “the irony of God,” of which Schelling spoke, is first, as always, turned in on itself. God is in perpetual revolt against God. (Livre des questions, p. 177) God is an interrogation of God. (Ibid., p. 152)

Kafka said: “We are nihilist thoughts in the brain of God.” If God opens the question in God, if he is the very opening of the Question, there can be no simplicity of God. And, thus, that which was unthinkable for the classical rationalists here becomes the obvious itself. Proceeding within the duplicity of his own questionability, God does not act in the simplest ways; he is not truthful, he is not sincere. Sincerity, which is simplicity, is a lying virtue. It is necessary, on the contrary, to accede to the virtue of the lie. “Reb Jacob, who was my first master, believed in the virtue of the lie because, he said, there is no writing without a lie and writing is the way of God”. (p. 92).

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The clumsy, equivocal way of the detour, borrowed by God from God. Irony of God, ruse of God, the oblique way, born of God, the path toward God of which man is not a simple detour. The infinite detour. Way of God. “Yukel, speak to us of the man who is a lie in God” (p. 94). This way, preceded by no truth, and thus lacking the prescription of truth’s rigor, is the way through the Desert. Writing is the moment of the desert as the moment of Separation. As their name indicates—in Aramaic—the Pharisees, those misunderstood men of literality, were also “separated ones.” God no longer speaks to us; he has interrupted himself: we must take words upon ourselves. We must be separated from life and communities, and must entrust ourselves to traces, must become men of vision because we have ceased hearing the voice from within the immediate proximity of the garden. “Sarah, Sarah with what does the world begin?—With speech?—With vision?” (p. 173). Writing is displaced on the broken line between lost and promised speech. The difference between speech and writing is sin, the anger of God emerging from itself, lost immediacy, work outside the garden. “The garden is speech, the desert writing. In each grain of sand a sign surprises” (p. 169). The Judaic experience as reflection, as separation of life and thought, signifies the crossing of the book as an infinite anchoritism placed between two immediacies and two self-identifications. “Yukel, how many pages to live, how many to die, separate you from yourself, separate you from the book to the abandoning of the book?” (p. 44). The desert-book is made of sand, “of mad sand,” of infinite, innumerable and vain sand. “Pick up a little sand, wrote Reb Ivri . . . then you will know the vanity of the verb” (p. 122). The Jewish consciousness is indeed the unhappy consciousness, and Le livre des questions is its poem; is the poem inscribed just beyond the phenomenology of the mind, which the Jew can accompany only for a short while, without eschatological provision, in order not to limit his desert, close his book and cauterize his cry.5 “Mark the first page of a book with a red ribbon, for the wound is inscribed at its beginning. Reb Alcé” (p. 122). If absence is the heart of the question, if separation can emerge only in the rupture of God—with God—if the infinite distance of the Other is respected only within the sands of a book in which wandering and mirages are always possible, then Le livre des questions is simultaneously the interminable song of absence and a book on the book. Absence attempts to produce itself in the book and is lost in being pronounced;

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it knows itself as disappearing and lost, and to this extent it remains inaccessible and impenetrable. To gain access to it is to lose it; to show it is to hide it; to acknowledge it is to lie. “Nothing is our principle concern, said Reb Idar” (p. 188), and Nothing—like Being—can only keep silent and hide itself.6 Absence. Absence of locality, first of all. “Sarah: Speech annihilates distance, makes the locale despair. Do we formulate speech or does it fashion us?” The absence of a place is the title of one of the poems collected in Je bâtis ma demeure. It began thus: “Vague estate, obsessed page . . .” And Le livre des questions resolutely keeps itself on the vague estate, in the non-place, between city and desert, for in either the root is equally rejected or sterilized. Nothing flourishes in sand or between cobblestones, if not words. City and desert, which are neither countries, nor countrysides, nor gardens, besiege the poetry of Jabès and ensure that it will have a necessarily infinite echo. City and desert simultaneously, that is, Cairo, whence Jabès comes to us; he too, as is well known, had his flight from Egypt. The dwelling built by the poet with his “swords stolen from angels” is a fragile tent of words erected in the desert where the nomadic Jew is struck with infinity and the letter. Broken by the broken Law. Divided within himself—(the Greek tongue would doubtless tell us much about the strange relation between law, wandering, and nonidentification with the self, the common root—nemein—of division, naming and nomadism). The poet of writing can only devote himself to the “unhappiness” that Nietzsche invokes upon, or promises to invoke upon, him who “hides deserts within him.” The poet—or the Jew— protects the desert which protects both his speech (which can speak only in the desert), and his writing (which can be traced only in the desert). That is to say, by inventing, alone, an unfindable and unspecifiable pathway to which no Cartesian resolution can impart rectilinearity and issuance. “Where is the way? The way is always to be found. A white sheet of paper is full of ways. . . . We will go over the same way ten times, a hundred times” (Livre des questions, p. 55). Unwittingly, writing simultaneously designs and discovers an invisible labyrinth in the desert, a city in the sand. “We will go over the same way ten times, a hundred times . . . And all these pathways have their own pathways.—Otherwise they would not be pathways” (p. 55). The entire first part of the Livre de l’absent can be read as a meditation on the way and the letter. “At noon, he found himself once more facing infinity, the white page. Every

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trace of footsteps had disappeared. Buried” (p. 56). And again the transition from the desert to the city, the Limit which is the only habitat of writing: “When he returned to his neighborhood and his house—a nomad had taken him on camel’s back to the nearest outpost where he had taken a seat in a military truck headed toward the city—so many words solicited him. He persisted, however in avoiding them” (p. 59). Absence of the writer too. For to write is to draw back. Not to retire into one’s tent, in order to write, but to draw back from one’s writing itself. To be grounded far from one’s language, to emancipate it or lose one’s hold on it, to let it make its way alone and unarmed. To leave speech. To be a poet is to know how to leave speech. To let it speak alone, which it can do only in its written form.7 To leave writing is to be there only in order to provide its passageway, to be the diaphanous element of its going forth: everything and nothing. For the work, the writer is at once everything and nothing. Like God: If, wrote Reb Servi, you occasionally think that God does not see you, it is because he has made himself so humble that you confuse him with the fly buzzing in the pane of your window. But that is the proof of his almightiness; for he is, simultaneously, Everything and Nothing. (Ibid., p. 117)

Like God, the writer: As a child, when I wrote my name for the first time I felt that I was starting a book. Reb Stein. (Ibid., p. 23) . . . But I am not this man for this man writes and the writer is no one.

(Ibid., p. 28)

I, Serafi, the absent one, I was born to write books. (I am absent because I am the storyteller. Only the story is real.)

(Ibid., p. 60)

And yet (this is only one of the contradictory postulations which ceaselessly tear apart the pages of the Livre des questions, and necessarily tear

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them apart: God contradicts himself already), only that which is written gives me existence by naming me. It is thus simultaneously true that things come into existence and lose existence by being named. Sacrifice of existence to the word, as Hegel said, but also the consecration of existence by the word. Moreover, it does not suffice to be written, for one must write in order to have a name. One must be called something. Which supposes that “My name is a question . . . Reb Eglal” (p. 125). “Without my texts, I am more anonymous than a bedsheet in the wind, more transparent than a windowpane” (p. 123). This necessary exchange of one’s existence with or for the letter— which is either to lose or to gain existence—is also imposed upon God: I did not seek you Sarah. I sought you. Through you, I ascend to the origin of the sign, to the unformulated writing sketched by the wind on the sand and on the sea, the untamed writing of the bird and the mischievous fish. God, Master of wind, Master of sand, Master of birds and fishes, expected from man the book that man expected from man; the one in order finally to be God, the other finally to be man. (Ibid., p. 189) All letters form absence. Thus God is the child of his name. Reb Tal. (Ibid., p. 47)

Maister Eckhart said: “God becomes God when creation says God.” This assistance given to God by man’s writing does not contradict writing’s inability to “help itself” (Phaedrus). Is not the divine—the disappearance of man—announced in this distress of writing? If absence does not allow itself to be reduced by the letter, this is so because it is the letter’s ether and respiration. The letter is the separation and limit in which meaning is liberated from its emprisonment in aphoristic solitude. No “logic,” no proliferation of conjunctive undergrowth can reach the end of its essential discontinuity and noncontemporaneousness, the ingenuity of its under-stood [sous-entendu] silences. The other originally collaborates with meaning. There is an essential lapse between significations which is not the simple and positive fraudulence of a word, nor even the nocturnal memory of all

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language. To allege that one reduces this lapse through narration, philosophical discourse, or the order of reasons or deduction, is to misconstrue language, to misconstrue that language is the rupture with totality itself. The fragment is neither a determined style nor a failure, but the form of that which is written. Unless God himself writes—and he would still have to be the God of the classical philosophers who neither interrupted nor interrogated himself, did not stifle himself, as did the God of Jabès. (But the God of the classical philosophers, whose actual infinity did not tolerate the question, precisely had no vital need for writing.) As opposed to Being and to the Leibnizian Book,8 the rationality of the Logos, for which our writing is responsible, obeys the principle of discontinuity. The caesura does not simply finish and fix meaning: “The aphorism,” says Nietzsche, “the sentence, in which I, as the first among the Germans, am a master, are the forms of eternity.” But, primarily, the caesura makes meaning emerge. It does not do so alone, of course; but without interruption—between letters, words, sentences, books—no signification could be awakened. Assuming that Nature refuses the leap, one can understand why Scripture will never be Nature. It proceeds by leaps alone. Which makes it perilous. Death strolls between letters. To write, what is called writing, assumes an access to the mind through having the courage to lose one’s life, to die away from nature. Jabès is very attentive to this generous distance between signs. The light is in their absence which you read. (Ibid., p. 25) All letters form absence. (Ibid., p. 47)

Absence is the permission given to letters to spell themselves out and to signify, but it is also, in language’s twisting of itself, what letters say: they say freedom and a granted emptiness, that which is formed by being enclosed in letters’ net. Absence, finally as the breath of the letter, for the letter lives. “The name must germinate, otherwise it is false,” says André Breton. Signifying absence or separation, the letter lives as aphorism. It is solitude,

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articulates solitude, and lives on solitude. It would no longer be the letter of the law if it were outside difference, or if it left its solitude, or put an end to interruption, to distance, to respect, and to its relation to the other, that is, a certain nonrelation. There is, thus, an animality of the letter which assumes the forms of the letter’s desire, anxiety, and solitude. Your solitude is an alphabet of squirrels at the disposition of forests. (“La clef de voûte,” in Je bâtis ma demeure)

Like the desert and the city, the forest, in which the fearful signs swarm, doubtless articulates the non-place and the wandering, the absence of prescribed routes, the solitary arising of an unseen root, beyond the reach of the sun. Toward a hidden sky. But the forest, outside the rigidity of its lines, is also trees clasped by terrified letters, the wood wounded by poetic incision. They engraved the fruit in the pain of the tree of solitude. . . . Like the sailor who grafts a name On that of the mast In the sign you are alone.

The tree of engraving and grafting no longer belongs to the garden; it is the tree of the forest or of the mast. The tree is to the mast what the desert is to the city. Like the Jew, like the poet, like man, like God, signs have a choice only between a natural or an institutionalized solitude. Then they are signs and the other becomes possible. The animality of the letter certainly appears, at first, as one metaphor among others. (For example, in Je bâtis ma demeure the sex is a vowel, etc., or even “Aided by an accomplice, a word sometimes changes its sex and its soul.” Or, further: “Vowels, as they are written, resemble the mouths of fish out of water pierced by the hook; consonants resemble dispossessed scales. They live uncomfortably in their acts, in their hovels of ink. Infinity haunts them” [p. 68]). But, above all, it is metaphor itself, the origin of language as metaphor in which Being and Nothing,

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the conditions of metaphor, the beyond-metaphor of metaphor, never say themselves. Metaphor, or the animality of the letter, is the primary and infinite equivocality of the signifier as Life. The psychic subversion of inert literality, that is to say, of nature, or of speech returned to nature. This overpowerfulness as the life of the signifier is produced within the anxiety and the wandering of the language always richer than knowledge, the language always capable of the movement which takes it further than peaceful and sedentary certitude. How can I say what I know with words whose signification is multiple? (Je bâtis ma demeure, p. 41)

Betrayed by citation, the organized power of the song keeps itself beyond the reach of commentary, in the Livre des questions. Here in particular, is it not born of an extraordinary confluence that weighs upon the canceling lines of words, the punctual singularity of Edmond Jabès’s experience, his voice, his style? A confluence in which is recalled, conjoined, and condensed the suffering, the millennial reflection of a people, the “pain” “whose past and continuity coincide with those of writing,” the destiny that summons the Jew, placing him between the voice and the cipher; and he weeps for the lost voice with tears as black as the trace of ink. Je bâtis ma demeure (“I build my dwelling”) is a line borrowed from La voix de l’encre (1949) (“The voice of ink”). And Le livre des questions: You gather that I attach great value to what is said, more, perhaps, than to what is written; for in what is written my voice is missing and I believe in it,—I mean the creative voice, not the auxiliary voice which is a servant (Livre des questions, p. 88)

(In the work of Emmanuel Levinas can be found the same hesitation, the same anxious movement within the difference between the Socratic and the Hebraic, the poverty and the wealth of the letter, the pneumatic and the grammatical.)9 Within original aphasia, when the voice of the god or the poet is

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missing, one must be satisfied with the vicars of speech that are the cry and writing. This is Le livre des questions, the poetic revolution of our century, the extraordinary reflection of man finally attempting today— and always in vain—to retake possession of his language (as if this were meaningful) by any means, through all routes, and to claim responsibility for it against a Father of Logos. One reads, for example, in Le livre de l’absent: “A decisive battle in which the vanquished, betrayed by their wounds, describe, as they fall to the ground, a page of writing dedicated by the victors to the chosen one who unwittingly set off the battle. In fact, it is in order to affirm the supremacy of the verb over man, of the verb over the verb, that the battle took place” (Livre de l’absent, p. 69). Is this confluence Le livre des questions? No. The song would no longer be sung if its tension was only confluential. Confluence must repeat the origin. This cry sings because in its enigma, it brings forth water from a cleft rock, the unique source, the unity of a spurting rupture. After which come “currents,” “affluents,” “influences.” A poem always runs the risk of being meaningless, and would be nothing without this risk of being meaningless, and would be nothing without this risk. If Jabès’s poem is to risk having a meaning, or if his question, at least, is to risk having a meaning, the source must be presumed; and it must be presumed that the unity of the source is not due to a chance encounter, but that beneath this encounter another encounter takes place today. A first encounter, an encounter above all unique because it was a separation, like the separation of Sarah and Yukel. Encounter is separation. Such a proposition, which contradicts “logic,” breaks the unity of Being—which resides in the fragile link of the “is”— by welcoming the other and difference into the source of meaning. But, it will be said, Being must always already be conceptualized in order to say these things—the encounter and the separation of what and of whom—and especially in order to say that encounter is separation. Certainly, but “must always already” precisely signifies the original exile from the kingdom of Being, signifies exile as the conceptualization of Being, and signifies that Being never is, never shows itself, is never present, Is never now, outside difference (in all the senses today required by this word).10 Whether he is Being or the master of beings, God himself is, and appears as what he is, within difference, that is to say, as difference and within dissimulation.

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If, in the process of adding pitiful graffiti to an immense poem, as we are doing here, one insisted upon reducing the poem to its “thematic structure,” as it is called, one would have to acknowledge that nothing within it is original. The well-worn themes of the question within God, of negativity within God as the liberation of historicity and human speech, of man’s writing as the desire and question of God (and the double genitive is ontological before being grammatical, or rather is the embedding of the ontological and the grammatical within the graphein),11 of history and discourse as the anger of God emerging himself, etc., etc.—these themes are not first proper to Böhme, to German romanticism, to Hegel, to the final Scheler, etc., etc. Negativity in God, exile as writing, the life of the letter are all already in the Cabala. Which means “Tradition” itself. And Jabès is conscious of the Cabalistic resonances of his book. He even plays on them, occasionally (cf., for example, Le livre de l’absent, p. 12). But traditionality is not orthodoxy. Others, perhaps, will articulate the ways in which Jabès also severs himself from the Jewish community, assuming that this last notion here has a sense, or has its classical sense. He does not sever himself from it only insofar as concerns dogma, but more profoundly still. For Jabès, who acknowledges a very late discovery of a certain way of being part of Judaism, the Jew is but the suffering allegory: “You are all Jews, even the antisemites, for you have all been designated for martyrdom” (Livre des questions, p. 180). He must justify himself to his blood brothers and to rabbis who are no longer imaginary. They will all reproach him for this universalism, this essentialism, this skeletal allegorism, this neutralization of the event in the realms of the symbolic and the imaginary. Addressing themselves to me, my blood brothers said: “You are not Jewish. You do not come to the synagogue.” . . . (Livre des questions, p. 63) The rabbis whose words you cite are charlatans. Have they ever existed? And you have nourished yourself on their impious words. . . . You are Jewish for the others and so little Jewish for us. Addressing himself to me, the most contemplative of my blood brothers said:

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writing and difference “To make no difference between a Jew and him who is not Jewish, is this not already to cease being a Jew?” And they added: “Brotherhood is to give, give, give, and you will never be able to give what you are.” Striking my chest with my fist I thought: “I am nothing. I have a severed head. But is not a man worth a man? And a decapitated one worth a believer?” (Ibid., p. 64)

Jabès is not a defendant in this dialogue, for he carries both it and the charges within him. In this noncoincidence of the self and the self, he is more and less Jewish than the Jew. But the Jew’s identification with himself does not exist. The Jew is split, and split first of all between the two dimensions of the letter: allegory and literality. His history would be but one empirical history among others if he established or nationalized himself within difference and literality. He would have no history at all if he let himself be attenuated within the algebra of an abstract universalism. Between the too warm flesh of the literal event and the cold skin of the concept runs meaning. This is how it enters into the book. Everything enters into, transpires in the book. This is why the book is never finite. It always remains suffering and vigilant. —A lamp is on my table and the house is in the book. —I will finally live in the house. (Ibid., p. 15) Where is the book found? —In the book. (Ibid.)

Every exit from the book is made within the book. Indeed, the end of writing keeps itself beyond writing: “Writing that culminates in itself is only a manifestation of spite.” If writing is not a tearing of the self toward the other within a confession of infinite separation, if it is a delectation of itself, the pleasure of writing for its own sake, the satisfaction of the artist, then it destroys itself. It syncopates itself in the roundness of the egg and the plenitude of the Identical. It is true that to go toward

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the other is also to negate oneself, and meaning is alienated from itself in the transition of writing. Intention surpasses itself and disengages from itself in order to be said. “I hate that which is pronounced in which already I am no longer” (p. 17). Just as the end of writing passes beyond writing, its origin is not yet in the book. The writer, builder, and guardian of the book posts himself at the entrance to the house. The writer is a ferryman and his destination always has a liminal signification. “Who are you?—The guardian of the house.—. . . Are you in the book?—My place is on the threshhold” (p. 15). But—and this is the heart of the matter—everything that is exterior in relation to the book, everything that is negative as concerns the book, is produced within the book. The exit from the book, the other and the threshhold, are all articulated within the book. The other and the threshhold can only be written, can only affirm themselves in writing. One emerges from the book only within the book, because, for Jabès, the book is not in the world, but the world is in the book. “The world exists because the book exists.” “The book is the work of the book” “The book multiplies the book” (p. 33). To be is to-be-in-the-book, even if Being is not the created nature often called the Book of God during the Middle Ages. “If God is, it is because He is in the book” (p. 32). Jabès knows that the book is possessed and threatened, that “its response is still a question, that its dwelling is ceaselessly threatened” (p. 32). But the book can only be threatened by nothing, non-Being, nonmeaning. If it came to be, the threat—as is the case here—would be avowed, pronounced, domesticated. It would be of the house and of the book. All historic anxiety, all poetic anxiety, all Judaic anxiety thus torments this poem of the interminable question. All affirmations and all negations, all contradictory questions are welcomed into the question within the unity of the book, in a logic like none other, in Logic. Here we would have to say Grammar. But does not this anxiety and this war, this unloosening of all the waters, rest upon the peaceful and silent basis of a nonquestion? Is not the writing of the question, by its decision, by its resolution, the beginning of repose and response? The first violence as regards the question? The first crisis and the first forgetting, the necessary beginning of wandering as history, that is to say, the very dissimulation of wandering? The nonquestion of which we are speaking is not yet a dogma; and

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the act of faith in the book can precede, as we know, belief in the Bible. And can also survive it. The nonquestion of which we are speaking is the unpenetrated certainty that Being is a Grammar; and that the world is in all its parts a cryptogram to be constituted or reconstituted through poetic inscription or deciphering; that the book is original, that everything belongs to the book before being and in order to come into the world; that any thing can be born only by approaching the book, can die only by failing in sight of the book; and that always the impassible shore of the book is first. But what if the Book was only, in all senses of the word, an epoch of Being (an epoch coming to an end which would permit us to see Being in the glow of its agony or the relaxation of its grasp, and an end which would multiply, like a final illness, like the garrulous and tenacious hypermnesia of certain moribunds, books about the dead book)? If the form of the book was no longer to be the model of meaning? If Being was radically outside the book, outside its letter? And was such by virtue of a transcendence which could no longer be touched by inscription and signification, a transcendence which would no longer lie on the page, and which above all would have arisen before it? If Being lost itself in books? If books were the dissipation of Being? If the Being of the world, its presence and the meaning of its Being, revealed itself only in illegibility, in a radical illegibility which would not be the accomplice of a lost or sought after legibility, of a page not yet cut from some divine encyclopedia? If the world were not even, according to Jaspers’s expression, “the manuscript of another,” but primarily the other of every possible manuscript? And if it were always too soon to say “revolt is a page crumpled in the waste basket” (p. 177)? And always too soon to say that evil is only indecipherable, due to the effect of some lapsus calami or of God’s cacography, and that “our life, within Evil, has the form of an inverted letter, a letter excluded because it is illegible in the Book of Books” (p. 85)? And if Death did not let itself be inscribed in the book in which, as is well known moreover, the God of the Jews every year inscribes only the names of those who may live? And if the dead soul were more or less, something other in any event, than the dead letter of the law which should always be capable of being reawakened? The dissimulation of an older or younger writing, from an age other than the age of the book, the age of grammar, the age of everything announced under

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the heading of the meaning of Being? The dissimulation of a still illegible writing? The radical illegibility of which we are speaking is not irrationality, is not despair provoking non-sense, is not everything within the domains of the incomprehensible and the illogical that is anguishing. Such an interpretation—or determination—of the illegible already belongs to the book, is enveloped within the possibility of the volume. Original illegibility is not simply a moment interior to the book, to reason or to logos; nor is it any more their opposite, having no relationship of symmetry to them, being incommensurable with them. Prior to the book (in the nonchronological sense), original illegibility is therefore the very possibility of the book and, within it, of the ulterior and eventual opposition of “rationalism” and “irrationalism.” The Being that is announced within the illegible is beyond these categories, beyond, as it writes itself, its own name. It would be ludicrous to impugn Jabès for not having pronounced these questions in Le livre des questions. They can only sleep within the literary act which needs both their life and their lethargy. Writing would die of the pure vigilance of the question, as it would of the simple erasure of the question. Is not to write, once more, to confuse ontology and grammar? The grammar in which are inscribed all the dislocations of dead syntax, all the aggressions perpetrated by speech against language, every questioning of the letter itself? The written questions addressed to literature, all the tortures inflicted upon it, are always transfigured, drained, forgotten by literature, within literature; having become modifications of itself, by itself, in itself, they are mortifications, that is to say, as always, ruses of life. Life negates itself in literature only so that it may survive better. So that it may be better. It does not negate itself any more than it affirms itself: it differs from itself, defers itself, and writes itself as différance. Books are always books of life (the archetype would be the Book of Life kept by the God of the Jews) or of afterlife (the archetype would be the Books of the Dead kept by the Egyptians). When Maurice Blanchot writes: “Is man capable of a radical interrogation, that is to say, finally, is man capable of literature?” one could just as well say, on the basis of a certain conceptualization of life, “incapable” half the time. Except if one admits that pure literature is nonliterature, or death itself. The question about the origin of the

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96 writing and difference book, the absolute interrogation, the interrogation of all possible interrogations, the “interrogation of God” will never belong to a book. Unless the question forgets itself within the articulations of its memory, the time of its interrogation, the time and tradition of its sentence, and unless the memory of itself, the syntax binding the question to itself, does not make a disguised affirmation of this origin. Already a book of the question becoming remote from its origin. Henceforth, so that God may indeed be, as Jabès says, an interrogation of God, would we not have to transform a final affirmation into a question? Literature would then, perhaps, only be the dreamlike displacement of this question: “There is the book of God in which God questions himself, and there is the book of man which is proportionate to that of God.” Reb Rida

4 VIOLENCE AND METAPHYSICS An essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas 1 Hebraism and Hellenism,—between these two points of influence moves our world. At one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time of the other; and it ought to be, though it never is, evenly and happily balanced between them. (Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy)

That philosophy died yesterday, since Hegel or Marx, Nietzsche, or Heidegger—and philosophy should still wander toward the meaning of its death—or that it has always lived knowing itself to be dying (as is silently confessed in the shadow of the very discourse which declared philosophia perennis); that philosophy died one day, within history, or that it has always fed on its own agony, on the violent way it opens history by opposing itself to nonphilosophy, which is its past and its concern, its death and wellspring; that beyond the death, or dying nature, of philosophy, perhaps even because of it, thought still has a future, or even, as is said today, is still entirely to come because of what philosophy has

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held in store; or, more strangely still, that the future itself has a future— all these are unanswerable questions. By right of birth, and for one time at least, these are problems put to philosophy as problems philosophy cannot resolve. It may even be that these questions are not philosophical, are not philosophy’s questions. Nevertheless, these should be the only questions today capable of founding the community, within the world, of those who are still called philosophers; and called such in remembrance, at very least, of the fact that these questions must be examined unrelentingly, despite the diaspora of institutes and languages, despite the publications and techniques that follow on each other, procreating and accumulating by themselves, like capital or poverty. A community of the question, therefore, within that fragile moment when the question is not yet determined enough for the hypocrisy of an answer to have already initiated itself beneath the mask of the question, and not yet determined enough for its voice to have been already and fraudulently articulated within the very syntax of the question. A community of decision, of initiative, of absolute initiality, but also a threatened community, in which the question has not yet found the language it has decided to seek, is not yet sure of its own possibility within the community. A community of the question about the possibility of the question. This is very little—almost nothing—but within it, today, is sheltered and encapsulated an unbreachable dignity and duty of decision. An unbreachable responsibility. Why unbreachable? Because the impossible has already occurred. The impossible according to the totality of what is questioned, according to the totality of beings, objects and determinations, the impossible according to the history of facts, has occurred: there is a history of the question, a pure memory of the pure question which in its possibility perhaps authorizes all inheritance and all pure memory in general and as such. The question has already begun—we know it has—and this strange certainty about an other absolute origin, an other absolute decision that has secured the past of the question, liberates an incomparable instruction: the discipline of the question. Through (through, that is to say that we must already know how to read) this discipline, which is not yet even the inconceivable tradition of the negative (of negative determination), and which is completely previous to irony, to maieutics, to epoché, and to doubt, an

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injunction is announced: the question must be maintained. As a question. The liberty of the question (double genitive)2 must be stated and protected. A founded dwelling, a realized tradition of the question remaining a question. If this commandment has an ethical meaning, it is not in that it belongs to the domain of the ethical, but in that it ultimately authorizes every ethical law in general. There is no stated law, no commandment, that is not addressed to a freedom of speech. There is therefore neither law nor commandment which does not confirm and enclose—that is, does not dissimulate by presupposing it— the possibility of the question. Thus, the question is always enclosed; it never appears immediately as such, but only through the hermetism of a proposition in which the answer has already begun to determine the question. The purity of the question can only be indicated or recalled through the difference of a hermeneutical effort. Thus, those who look into the possibility of philosophy, philosophy’s life and death, are already engaged in, already overtaken by the dialogue of the question about itself and with itself; they always act in remembrance of philosophy, as part of the correspondence of the question with itself. Essential to the destiny of this correspondence, then, is that it comes to speculate, to reflect, and to question about itself within itself. This is where the objectification, secondary interpretation, and determination of the question’s own history in the world all begin; and this is where the combat embedded in the difference between the question in general and “philosophy” as a determined— finite and mortal—moment or mode of the question itself also begins. The difference between philosophy as a power and adventure of the question itself and philosophy as a determined event or turning point within this adventure. This difference is better conceived today. That this difference has come to light, has been conceptualized as such, is doubtless an unnoticed and inessential sign for the historian of facts, techniques, and ideas. But, understood in all its implications, it is perhaps the most deeply inscribed characteristic of our age. And would not better thinking this difference be knowing that if something is still to transpire within the tradition by which philosophers always know themselves to be overtaken, then the tradition’s origin will have to be summoned forth and adhered to as rigorously as possible? Which is not to

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100 writing and difference stammer and huddle lazily in the depths of childhood, but precisely the opposite. Close to us and since Hegel, in his mighty shadow, the two great voices which have ordered us to this total repetition—which itself has recalled us to ourselves and has been acknowledged as of utmost philosophical urgency—are those of Husserl and Heidegger. Despite the most profound dissimilarities, the appeal to tradition—which is in no way traditional—is shaped by an intention common to Husserlian phenomenology and to what we will call provisionally, by approximation and for reasons of economy, Heideggerean “ontology.”3 Thus, very briefly: 1. The entirety of philosophy is conceived on the basis of its Greek source. As is well known, this amounts neither to an occidentalism, nor to a historicism.4 It is simply that the founding concepts of philosophy are primarily Greek, and it would not be possible to philosophize, or to speak philosophically, outside this medium. That Plato, for Husserl, was the founder of a reason and a philosophical task whose telos was still sleeping in the shadows; or that for Heidegger, on the contrary, Plato marks the moment at which the thought of Being forgets itself and is determined as philosophy—this difference is decisive only at the culmination of a common root which is Greek. The difference is fraternal in its posterity, entirely submitted to the same domination. Domination of the same too, which will disappear neither in phenomenology nor in “ontology.” 2. The archaeology to which Husserl and Heidegger lead us by different paths entails, for both, a subordination or transgression, in any event a reduction of metaphysics. Even though, for each, this gesture has an entirely different meaning, or at least does so apparently. 3. Finally, the category of the ethical is not only dissociated from metaphysics but coordinated with something other than itself, a previous and more radical function. When ethics is not treated this way, when law, the power of resolution, and the relationship to the other are once more part of the archia, they lose their ethical specificity.5

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These three motifs arrayed at the unique source of the unique philosophy would indicate the only possible direction to be taken by any philosophical resource in general. Any possible dialogue between Husserlian phenomenology and Heideggerean “ontology,” at every point where they are more or less directly implicated, can be understood only from within the Greek tradition. At the moment when the fundamental conceptual system produced by the Greco-European adventure is in the process of taking over all of humanity, these three motifs would predetermine the totality of the logos and of the worldwide historico-philosophical situation. No philosophy could possibly dislodge them without first succumbing to them, or without finally destroying itself as a philosophical language. At a historical depth which the science and philosophies of history can only presuppose, we know that we are consigned to the security of the Greek element; and we know it with a knowledge and a confidence which are neither habitual nor comfortable but, on the contrary, permit us to experience torment or distress in general. For example, the consciousness of crisis is for Husserl but the provisional, almost necessary covering up of a transcendental motif which in Descartes and in Kant was already beginning to accomplish the Greek aim: philosophy as science. When Heidegger says that “for a long time, too long, thought has been desiccated,” like a fish out of water, the element to which he wishes to return thought is still—already—the Greek element, the Greek thought of Being, the thought of Being whose irruption or call produced Greece. The knowledge and security of which we are speaking are therefore not in the world: rather, they are the possibility of our language and the nexus of our world. It is at this level that the thought of Emmanuel Levinas can make us tremble. At the heart of the desert, in the growing wasteland, this thought, which fundamentally no longer seeks to be a thought of Being and phenomenality, makes us dream of an inconceivable process of dismantling and dispossession. 1. In Greek, in our language, in a language rich with all the alluvia of its history—and our question takes shape already—in a language that admits to its powers of seduction while playing on them

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102 writing and difference unceasingly, this thought summons us to a dislocation of the Greek logos, to a dislocation of our identity, and perhaps of identity in general; it summons us to depart from the Greek site and perhaps from every site in general, and to move toward what is no longer a source or a site (too welcoming to the gods), but toward an exhalation, toward a prophetic speech already emitted not only nearer to the source than Plato or the pre-Socratics, but inside the Greek origin, close to the other of the Greek (but will the other of the Greek be the non-Greek? Above all, can it be named the non-Greek? And our question comes closer.) A thought for which the entirety of the Greek logos has already erupted, and is now a quiet topsoil deposited not over bedrock, but around a more ancient volcano. A thought which, without philology and solely by remaining faithful to the immediate, but buried nudity of experience itself, seeks to liberate itself from the Greek domination of the Same and the One (other names for the light of Being and of the phenomenon) as if from oppression itself—an oppression certainly comparable to none other in the world, an ontological or transcendental oppression, but also the origin or alibi of all oppression in the world. A thought, finally, which seeks to liberate itself from a philosophy fascinated by the “visage of being that shows itself in war” which “is fixed in the concept of totality which dominates Western philosophy” (Totality and Infinity [hereafter TI], p. 21). 2. This thought nevertheless seeks to define itself, in its primary possibility, as metaphysical (a Greek notion however, if we follow the vein of our question). A metaphysics that Levinas seeks to raise up from its subordinate position and whose concept he seeks to restore in opposition to the entire tradition derived from Aristotle. 3. This thought calls upon the ethical relationship—a nonviolent relationship to the infinite as infinitely other, to the Other6—as the only one capable of opening the space of transcendence and of liberating metaphysics. And does so without supporting ethics and metaphysics by anything other than themselves, and without making them flow into other streams at their source. In question, therefore, is a powerful will to explication of the history of Greek speech. Powerful because, if this attempt is not the first of its

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kind, it reaches a height and a level of penetration in its dialogue at which the Greeks—and foremost among them the two Greeks named Husserl and Heidegger—are called upon to respond. If the messianic eschatology from which Levinas draws inspiration seeks neither to assimilate itself into what is called a philosophical truism, nor even to “complete” (TI, p. 22) philosophical truisms, nevertheless it is developed in its discourse neither as a theology, nor as a Jewish mysticism (it can even be understood as the trial of theology and mysticism); neither as a dogmatics, nor as a religion, nor as a morality. In the last analysis it never bases its authority on Hebraic theses or texts. It seeks to be understood from within a recourse to experience itself. Experience itself and that which is most irreducible within experience: the passage and departure toward the other; the other itself as what is most irreducibly other within it: Others. A recourse not to be confused with what has always been called a philosophical enterprise, but which reaches a point at which an exceeded philosophy cannot not be brought into question. Truthfully, messianic eschatology is never mentioned literally: it is but a question of designating a space or a hollow within naked experience where this eschatology can be understood and where it must resonate. This hollow space is not an opening among others. It is opening itself, the opening of opening, that which can be enclosed within no category or totality, that is, everything within experience which can no longer be described by traditional concepts, and which resists every philosopheme. What do this explication and this reciprocal surpassing of two origins and two historical speeches signify? Do a new élan and some strange community begin to take shape, without being the spiraling return of Alexandrian promiscuity? If we recall that Heidegger, too, seeks to open the passageway to a former speech which, supporting itself from within philosophy, carries us to the outer or inner reaches of philosophy, what do this other speech and this other passageway signify here? It is this space of interrogation that we have chosen for a very partial7 reading of Levinas’s work. Of course it is not our intention to explore this space, even in the name of a timid beginning. Faintly and from afar, we will only attempt to point it out. First of all, in the style of commentary, we will try to remain faithful to the themes and audacities of a thought—and this despite several parentheses and notes

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104 writing and difference which will enclose our perplexity. Faithful also to its history, whose patience and anxiety capitulate and carry within themselves the reciprocal interrogation of which we wish to speak.8 Then we will attempt to ask several questions. If they succeed in approaching the heart of this explication, they will be nothing less than objections, but rather the questions put to us by Levinas. We have just spoken of “themes” and of the “history of a thought.” The difficulty is classical and concerns not only method. The brevity of these pages will only intensify it. We will not choose. We will refuse to sacrifice the history of Levinas’s thought and works to the order or aggregate of themes—which must not be called a system—assembled and enriched in the great book Totality and Infinity. And if we must, for once, have faith in him who stands most accused in the trial conducted by this book, the result is nothing without its becoming.9 But neither will we sacrifice the self-coherent unity of intention to the becoming, which then would be no more than pure disorder. We will not choose between the opening and the totality. Therefore we will be incoherent, but without systematically resigning ourselves to incoherence. The possibility of the impossible system will be on the horizon to protect us from empiricism. Without reflecting here upon the philosophy of this hesitation, let us note between parentheses that by simply articulating it we have already come close to Levinas’s own problematic.

I THE VIOLENCE OF LIGHT The departure from Greece was discreetly premeditated in Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. In France, in 1930, this was the first major work devoted to the entirety of Husserl’s thought. Through a remarkable exposition of the developments of phenomenology, such as were then available from the published works and teachings of the master, and through precautions which already acknowledged the “surprises” that Husserl’s meditations and unpublished works might “hold in store,” a reticence was announced. The imperialism of theoria already bothered Levinas. More than any other philosophy, phenomenology, in the wake of Plato, was to be struck with light. Unable to reduce the last naïveté, the naïveté of the glance, it predetermined Being as object.10

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At this point, the accusation remains timid and is not of a piece. (a) First, it is difficult to maintain a philosophical discourse against light. And thirty years later, when the charges against theoretism and (Husserlian) phenomenology became the essential motifs in the break with tradition, the nudity of the face of the other—this epiphany of a certain non-light before which all violence is to be quieted and disarmed—will still have to be exposed to a certain enlightenment. Especially as concerns the violence implicit in phenomenology. (b) Next, it is difficult to overlook the fact that Husserl so little predetermined Being as object that in Ideas I absolute existence is accorded only to pure consciousness. True, it has often been argued that the difference hardly counts, and that a philosophy of consciousness is always a philosophy of the object. Levinas’s reading of Husserl on this point has always been nuanced, supple, contrasted. As early as in the Theory of Intuition, theory is correctly distinguished from objectivity in general. As we shall see later, practical, axiological, etc., consciousness is for Husserl too a consciousness of the object. Levinas openly acknowledges this. Therefore, the accusation is really directed against the irreducible primacy of the subject-object correlation. But, later, Levinas will insist more and more on those aspects of Husserlian phenomenology which take us to the inner or outer reaches of the “subjectobject correlation.” For example, this would be “intentionality as a relationship with otherness,” as an “exteriority which is not objective,” sensibility, passive genesis, the movement of temporalization, etc.11 (c) Further, for Levinas the sun of the epekeina tes ousias will always illuminate the pure awakening and inexhaustible source of thought (TI, p.127). It is not only the Greek ancestor of the Infinite which transcends totality (the totality of being or of noema, the totality of the same or the ego),12 but is also the instrument of destruction for the phenomenology and ontology subjected to the neutral totality of the Same as Being or as Ego. All the essays in 1947 grouped under the title De l’existence à l’existant will be placed under the sign of “the Platonic formulation placing the Good

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106 writing and difference beyond Being.” (In Totality and Infinity the “Phenomenology of Eros” describes the movement of the epekeina tes ousias in the very experience of the caress.) In 1947 Levinas calls this movement, which is not theological, not a transcendence toward “a superior existence,” “ex-cendence.” With a foothold in being, excendence is a “departure from being and from the categories which describe it.” This ethical excendence designates the site—rather the nonsite—of metaphysics as metatheology, metaontology, metaphenomenology. We will have to return to this reading of the epekeina tes ousias and its relationship to ontology. Since we are speaking of light, let us note for the moment that the Platonic movement is interpreted such that it leads no longer to the sun but even beyond light and Being, beyond the light of Being. “We thus encounter in our own way the Platonic idea of the Good beyond Being,” we read at the end of Totality and Infinity (p. 293–my italics), concerning creation and fecundity. In our own way, which is to say that ethical excendence is not projected toward the neutrality of the good, but toward the Other, and that which (is) epekeina tes ousias is not essentially light but fecundity or generosity. Creation is but creation of the other; it can be only as paternity, and the relations of the father to son escape all the logical, ontological, and phenomenological categories in which the absoluteness of the other is necessarily the same. (But did not the Platonic sun already enlighten the visible sun, and did not excendence play upon the meta-phor of these two suns? Was not the Good the necessarily nocturnal source of all light? The light of light beyond light. The heart of light is black, as has often been noticed.13 Further, Plato’s sun does not only enlighten: it engenders. The good is the father of the visible sun which provides living beings with “creation, growth and nourishment” Republic, 508a—509b.) (d) Finally, Levinas is certainly quite attentive to everything in Husserl’s analyses which tempers or complicates the primordiality of theoretical consciousness. In a paragraph devoted to nontheoretical consciousness, it is acknowledged that the primacy of objectivity in general is not necessarily confused, in Ideas I, with the primacy of the theoretical attitude. There are nontheoretical acts and objects “of a new and irreducible ontological structure.” “For example,

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says Husserl, the act of valorization constitutes an axiological object (Gegenständlichkeit), specific in relation to the world of things; constitutes a being from a new region.” Levinas also admits on several occasions that the importance accorded to theoretical objectivity has to do with the transcendental guide most often chosen in Ideas I: the perception of extended things. (However, we already know that this guide could be only a provisional example.) Despite all these precautions, despite a constant oscillation between the letter and the spirit of Husserlianism (the former most often contested in the name of the latter),14 and despite Levinas’s insistence upon what is called a “fluctuation in Husserl’s thought,” a break not to be reconsidered is signified. The phenomenological reduction, whose “historical role . . . is not even a problem” for Husserl, remains a prisoner of the natural attitude which is possible “in the extent to which the latter is theoretical.”15 “Husserl gives himself the liberty of theory as he gives himself theory itself.” Chapter 4 of La conscience théorique designates, within a compressed and nuanced analysis, the point of departure: one cannot simultaneously maintain the primacy of the objectifying act and the irreducible originality of nontheoretical consciousness. And if “the conception of consciousness in the 5th Untersuchung seems to us not only to affirm a primacy of theoretical consciousness, but sees it as the only access to what creates the being of the object,” if “the existing world, which is revealed to us, has the mode of existence of the object given over to the theoretical glance,” if “the real world is the world of knowledge,” if “in his [Husserl’s] philosophy . . . knowledge and representation16 is not a mode of life to the same degree as the others, nor a secondary mode,” then “we will have to take our leave.” One already foresees the unease to which a thought rejecting the excellence of theoretical rationality will have to resign itself later, especially in that it never ceases to appeal to the most uprooted rationalism and universalism against the violences of mysticism and history, against the ravishing of enthusiasm and ecstasy. One foresees too, the difficulties of a progression which leads to a metaphysics of separation through a reduction of theoretism. For separation, distance or impassiveness heretofore have been the targets of the classical objections

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108 writing and difference against theoretism and objectivism. On the contrary, there will be more force—and danger—in denouncing the blindness of theoretism, its inability to depart from itself towards absolute exteriority, towards the totally-other, the infinitely-other “more objective than objectivity” (TI). The complicity of theoretical objectivity and mystical communion will be Levinas’s true target. The premetaphysical unity of one and the same violence. An alternation which always modifies the same confinement of the other. In 1930 Levinas turns toward Heidegger against Husserl. Sein und Zeit is published, and Heidegger’s teaching begins to spread. Everything which overflows the commentary and “letter” of Husserl’s texts moves toward “ontology,” “in the very special sense Heidegger gives to the term” (Théorie de l’intuition [hereafter THI]). In his critique of Husserl, Levinas retains two Heideggerean themes: (1) despite “the idea, so profound, that in the ontological order the world of science is posterior to the concrete and vague world of perception, and depends upon it,” Husserl “perhaps was wrong to see in this concrete world, a world of perceived objects above all” (THI). Heidegger goes further, since for him this world is not primarily given over to the glance, but is rather—and we wonder whether Heidegger would have accepted this formulation— “ in its very Being like a center of action, a field of activity or of solicitude” (ibid.). (2) if Husserl was right in his opposition to historicism and naturalistic history, he neglected “the historical situation of man. . . understood in another sense.”17 There exist a historicity and a temporality of man that are not only predicates but “the very substantiality of his substance.” It is “this structure . . . which occupies such an important place in Heidegger’s thought” (ibid.). One already foresees the unease to which a thought rejecting the excellence of a “philosophy” which “appears . . . as independent of man’s historical situation as a theory seeking to consider everything sub specie aeternitatis” (THI) will have to resign itself later, especially in that it never ceases to call upon the “eschatology” which like experience “as the ‘beyond’ of history withdraws beings from history’s jurisdiction.” There is no contradiction here but rather a displacement of concepts— in this case the concept of history—which we must follow. Perhaps then the appearance of contradiction will vanish as the fantasy of a

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philosophy enveloped in its own fundamental conceptions. A contradiction according to what Levinas often will call “formal logic.” Let us follow this displacement. The respectful, moderate reproach directed against Husserl in a Heideggerean style will soon become the main charge of an indictment this time directed against Heidegger, and made with a violence that will not cease to grow. Certainly it is not a question of denouncing as militant theoretism a thought which, in its initial act, refused to treat the self-evidence of the object as its ultimate recourse; a thought for which the historicity of meaning, according to Levinas’s own terms, “destroys clarity and constitution as authentic modes of the existence of the mind” (En découvrant l’existence [hereafter EDE]); and for which, finally, “the self-evident is no longer the fundamental mode of intellection,” for which “existence is irreducible to the light of the self-evident” and “the drama of existence” is played out “before light” (ibid.). Nevertheless, at a singular depth—but the fact and the accusation are made only more significant by it—Heidegger still would have questioned and reduced theoretism from within, and in the name of, a Greco-Platonic tradition under the surveillance of the agency of the glance and the metaphor of light. That is, by the spatial pair inside-outside (but is this, in all its aspects, a spatial pair?) which gives life to the opposition of subject and object. By allegedly reducing this last schema, Heidegger would have retained what made it possible and necessary: light, unveiling, comprehension or precomprehension. This is what the texts written after En découvrant l’existence tell us. “Heideggerean care, illuminated as it is by comprehension (even if comprehension offers itself as care), is already determined by the structure ‘inside-outside’ that characterizes light.” In making the structure “inside-outside” tremble at the point where it would have resisted Heidegger, Levinas in no way pretends to erase it, or to deny its meaning and existence. Nor does he do so, moreover, when the opposition subject-object or cogito-cogitatum is in question. In the style by which strong and faithful thought is recognized (this is Heidegger’s style too), Levinas respects the zone or layer of traditional truth; and the philosophies whose presuppositions he describes are in general neither refuted nor criticized. Here, for example, it is a question simply of revealing beneath this truth, as that which founds it and is dissimulated within it, “a situation which precedes the division of Being into an

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110 writing and difference inside and an outside.” However it is also a question of inaugurating, in a way that is to be new, quite new, a metaphysics of radical separation and exteriority. One anticipates that this metaphysics will have some difficulty finding its language in the medium of a traditional logos entirely governed by the structure “inside-outside,” “interior-exterior.” Thus, “without being knowledge, Heidegger’s temporality is ecstasy, ‘being outside itself.’ Not a transcendence of theory, but already deportation from an interior toward an exterior.” The structure of Mitsein18 itself will be interpreted as a Platonic inheritance, belonging to the world of light. In effect, through the experience of eros and paternity, through the waiting for death, there should arise a relationship to the other which can no longer be understood as a modification of “the Eleatic notion of Being” (Le temps et l’autre [hereafter TA]). The latter would demand that multiplicity be included in, subjected to, the domination of unity. And it would still govern Plato’s philosophy, according to Levinas, even unto its concept of femininity (conceived as matter in the categories of activity and passivity) and its concept of the city-state which “must imitate the world of ideas.” “It is . . . toward a pluralism which does not fuse into unity that we wish to make our way; and, if it can be dared, to break with Parmenides” (TA). Thus, Levinas exhorts us to a second parricide. The Greek father who still holds us under his sway must be killed; and this is what a Greek—Plato—could never resolve to do, deferring the act into a hallucinatory murder. A hallucination within the hallucination that is already speech. But will a non-Greek ever succeed in doing what a Greek in this case could not do, except by disguising himself as a Greek, by speaking Greek, by feigning to speak Greek in order to get near the king? And since it is a question of killing a speech, will we ever know who is the last victim of this stratagem? Can one feign speaking a language? The Eleatic stranger and disciple of Parmenides had to give language its due for having vanquished him: shaping non-Being according to Being, he had to “say farewell to an unnamable opposite of Being” and had to confine non-Being to its relativity to Being, that is to the movement of alterity. Why was the repetition of the murder necessary according to Levinas? Because the Platonic gesture will be ineffectual for as long as multiplicity and alterity are not understood as the absolute solitude of the

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existent in its existence. These are the translations of Seiendes and Sein chosen by Levinas at this point “for reasons of euphony” (TA).19 This choice will always retain a certain ambiguity: by existent, in effect, Levinas almost if not always understands the being which is man, being in the form of Dasein. Now, thus understood, the existent is not being (Seiendes) in general, but refers to what Heidegger calls Existenz—mainly because it has the same root—that is “the mode of Being, and precisely, the Being of the being which keeps itself open for the aperture of Being, and within it.” “Was bedeutet ‘Existenz’ in Sein und Zeit? Das wort nennt eine Weise des Seins, und zwar das Sein desjenigen Seienden, das offen steht für die Offenheit des Seins, in der es steht, indem es sie aussteht” (Introduction to Was ist Metaphysik). Now this solitude of the “existent” in its “existence” would be primordial and could not be conceived on the basis of the neutral unity of existence which Levinas often and profoundly describes under the heading of the “there is.” But is not the “there is” the totality of indeterminate, neutral, anonymous beings rather than Being itself? The theme of the “there is” calls for systematic confrontation with Heidegger’s allusions to the “es gibt” (Being and Time, Letter on Humanism), and for a confrontation too, of terror, which Levinas opposes to Heideggerean anguish, with the experience of fright, which Heidegger says, in the Nachwort to Was ist Metaphysik, “always resides near essential anxiety.” The relationship to the other arises from the depths of this solitude. Without it, without this primordial secret, parricide is philosophy’s theatrical fiction. To understand the secret on the basis of the unity of existence, on the pretext that it exists or that it is the secret of the existent, “is to confine oneself to unity, and to let Parmenides escape every parricide” (TA). Therefore, Levinas henceforth will move toward a thought of original difference. Is this thought in contradiction with Heidegger’s intentions? Is there a difference between this difference and the difference of which Heidegger speaks? Is their juxtaposition anything but verbal? And which difference is more original? We will consider these questions later. A world of light and of unity, a “philosophy of a world of light, a world without time.” In this heliopolitics “the social ideal will be sought in an ideal of fusion . . . the subject . . . losing himself in a

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112 writing and difference collective representation, in a common ideal. . . . It is the collectivity which says ‘us,’ and which, turned toward the intelligible sun, toward the truth, experience, the other at his side and not face to face with him. . . . Miteinandersein also remains the collectivity of the with, and its authentic form is revealed around the truth.” Now, “we hope to show, for our part, that it is not the preposition mit which must describe the original relation with the other.” Beneath solidarity, beneath companionship, before Mitsein, which would be only a derivative and modified form of the originary relation with the other, Levinas already aims for the face-to-face, the encounter with the face. “Face to face without intermediary” and without “communion.” Without intermediary and without communion, neither mediate nor immediate, such is the truth of our relation to the other, the truth to which the traditional logos is forever inhospitable. This unthinkable truth of living experience, to which Levinas returns ceaselessly, cannot possibly be encompassed by philosophical speech without immediately revealing, by philosophy’s own light, that philosophy’s surface is severely cracked, and that what was taken for its solidity is its rigidity. It could doubtless be shown that it is in the nature of Levinas’s writing, at its decisive moments, to move along these cracks, masterfully progressing by negations, and by negation against negation. Its proper route is not that of an “either this . . . or that,” but of a “neither this . . . nor that.” The poetic force of metaphor is often the trace of this rejected alternative, this wounding of language. Through it, in its opening, experience itself is silently revealed. Without intermediary and without communion, absolute proximity and absolute distance: “eros in which, within the proximity to the other, distance is integrally maintained; eros whose pathos is made simultaneously of this proximity and this duality.” A community of nonpresence, and therefore of nonphenomenality. Not a community without light, not a blindfolded synagogue, but a community anterior to Platonic light. A light before neutral light, before the truth which arrives as a third party, the truth “which we look toward together,” the judgmental arbitrator’s truth. Only the other, the totally other, can be manifested as what it is before the shared truth, within a certain nonmanifestation and a certain absence. It can be said only of the other that its phenomenon is a certain nonphenomenon, its presence (is) a

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certain absence. Not pure and simple absence, for there logic could make its claim, but a certain absence. Such a formulation shows clearly that within this experience of the other the logic of noncontradiction, that is, everything which Levinas designates as “formal logic,” is contested in its root. This root would be not only the root of our language, but the root of all of Western philosophy,20 particularly phenomenology and ontology. This naïveté would prevent them from thinking the other (that is from thinking; and this would indeed be the reason why, although Levinas, “the enemy of thought,” does not say so), and from aligning their discourse with the other. The consequence would be double. (a) Because they do not think the other, they do not have time. Without time, they do not have history. The absolute alterity of each instant, without which there would be no time, cannot be produced—constituted—within the identity of the subject or the existent. It comes into time through the Other. Bergson and Heidegger would have overlooked this (De l’existence à l’existent [hereafter EE]), and Husserl even more so. (b) More seriously, to renounce the other (not by being weaned from it, but by detaching oneself from it, which is actually to be in relation to it, to respect it while nevertheless overlooking it, that is, while knowing it, identifying it, assimilating it), to renounce the other is to enclose oneself within solitude (the bad solitude of solidity and self-identity) and to repress ethical transcendence. In effect, if the Parmenidean tradition—we know now what this means for Levinas—disregards the irreducible solitude of the “existent,” by the same token it disregards the relationship to the other. It does not think solitude, it does not appear to itself to be solitude, because it is the solitude of totality and opacity. “Solipsism is neither observation nor sophism; it is the very structure of reason.” Therefore, there is a soliloquy of reason and a solitude of light. Incapable of respecting the Being and meaning of the other, phenomenology and ontology would be philosophies of violence. Through them, the entire philosophical tradition, in its meaning and at bottom, would make common cause with oppression and with the totalitarianism of the same. The ancient clandestine friendship between light and power, the ancient complicity between theoretical objectivity and technico-political possession.21 “If the other could be possessed, seized, and known, it would not be the other. To possess, to know, to grasp are all synonyms of power” (TA). To

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114 writing and difference see and to know, to have and to will, unfold only within the oppressive and luminous identity of the same; and they remain, for Levinas, fundamental categories of phenomenology and ontology. Everything given to me within light appears as given to myself by myself. Henceforward, the heliological metaphor only turns away our glance, providing an alibi for the historical violence of light: a displacement of technicopolitical oppression in the direction of philosophical discourse. For it has always been believed that metaphors exculpate, lift the weight of things and of acts. If there is no history, except through language, and if language (except when it names Being itself or nothing: almost never) is elementally metaphorical, Borges is correct: “Perhaps universal history is but the history of several metaphors.” Light is only one example of these “several” fundamental “metaphors,” but what an example! Who will ever dominate it, who will ever pronounce its meaning without first being pronounced by it? What language will ever escape it? How, for example, will the metaphysics of the face as the epiphany of the other free itself of light? Light perhaps has no opposite; if it does, it is certainly not night. If all languages combat within it, modifying only the same metaphor and choosing the best light, Borges, several pages later, is correct again: “Perhaps universal history is but the history of the diverse intonations of several metaphors” (La sphère de Pascal; my italics).

II PHENOMENOLOGY, ONTOLOGY, METAPHYSICS These measures were critical, but they obeyed the voice of full certainty. They appeared, through the essays, the concrete and subtle analyses concerning exoticism, the caress, insomnia, fecundity, work, the instant, fatigue, only at the point, at the edge of the indescribable indestructible which opens up classical conceptuality, seeking its own conceptuality between rejections. Totality and infinity, the great work, not only enriches these concrete analyses but organizes them within a powerful architecture. Levinas calls the positive movement which takes itself beyond the disdain or disregard of the other, that is, beyond the appreciation or possession, understanding and knowledge of the other, metaphysics or ethics. Metaphysical transcendence is desire. This concept of desire is as anti-Hegelian as it can possibly be. It does not designate a movement of negation and assimilation, the negation

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of alterity first necessary in order to become “self-consciousness” “certain of itself ” (Phenomenology of the Mind and Encyclopedia). For Levinas, on the contrary, desire is the respect and knowledge of the other as other, the ethico-metaphysical moment whose transgression consciousness must forbid itself. According to Hegel, on the contrary, this gesture of transgression and assimilation is necessary and essential. Levinas sees in it a premetaphysical, natural necessity, and in several splendid analyses separates desire from enjoyment—which Hegel does not appear to do. Enjoyment is only deferred in work:22 thus, Hegelian desire would be only need, in Levinas’s sense. But one rightly suspects that things would appear more complicated, if one followed closely the movement of certitude and the truth of desire in the Phenomenology of the Mind. Despite his anti-Kierkegaardian protests, Levinas here returns to the themes of Fear and Trembling: the movement of desire can be what it is only paradoxically, as the renunciation of desire. Neither theoretical intentionality nor the affectivity of need exhaust the movement of desire: they have as their meaning and end their own accomplishment, their own fulfillment and satisfaction within the totality and identity of the same. Desire, on the contrary, permits itself to be appealed to by the absolutely irreducible exteriority of the other to which it must remain infinitely inadequate. Desire is equal only to excess. No totality will ever encompass it. Thus, the metaphysics of desire is a metaphysics of infinite separation. Not a consciousness of separation as a Judaic consciousness, as an unhappy consciousness:23 in the Hegelian Odyssey Abraham’s unhappiness is an expediency, the provisional necessity of a figure and a transition within the horizons of a reconciliatory return to self and absolute knowledge. Here there is no return. For desire is not unhappy. It is opening and freedom. Further, a desired infinite may govern desire itself, but it can never appease desire by its presence. “And if desire were to cease with God / Ah, I would envy you hell.” (May we cite Claudel to comment upon Levinas, when the latter also polemizes against “this spirit admired since [our] earliest youth”?) The infinitely other is the invisible, since vision opens up only the illusory and relative exteriority of theory and of need. A provisional exteriority, given only within sight of its own consummation, its own consumption. Inaccessible, the invisible is the most high. This

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116 writing and difference expression—perhaps inhabited by the Platonic resonances Levinas evokes, but more so by others more readily recognizable—tears apart, by the superlative excess, the spatial literality of the metaphor. No matter how high it is, height is always accessible; the most high, however, is higher than height. No addition of more height will ever measure it. It does not belong to space, is not of this world. But what necessity compels this inscription of language in space at the very moment when it exceeds space? And if the pole of metaphysical transcendence is a spatial non-height, what, in the last analysis, legitimates the expression of trans-ascendance, borrowed from Jean Wahl? The theme of the face perhaps will help us understand it. The ego is the same. The alterity or negativity interior to the ego, the interior difference, is but an appearance: an illusion, a “play of the Same,” the “mode of identification” of an ego whose essential moments are called body, possession, home, economy, etc. Levinas devotes some splendid descriptions to them. But this play of the same is not monotonous, is not repeated as monologue and formal tautology. As the work of identification and the concrete production of egoity, it entails a certain negativity. A finite negativity, an internal and relative modification through which the ego affects itself by itself, within its own movement of identification. Thus it alters itself toward itself within itself. The resistance to work, by provoking it, remains a moment of the same, a finite moment that forms a system and a totality with the agent. It necessarily follows, then, that Levinas will describe history as a blinding to the other, and as the laborious procession of the same. One may wonder whether history can be history, if there is history, when negativity is enclosed within the circle of the same, and when work does not truly meet alterity, providing itself with its own resistance. One wonders whether history itself does not begin with this relationship to the other which Levinas places beyond history. The framework of this question should govern the entire reading of Totality and Infinity. In any event, one observes the displacement of the concept of historicity of which we spoke above. It must be acknowledged that without this displacement no anti-Hegelianism could be logically consequent. The necessary condition for this anti-Hegelianism is therefore fulfilled. A precaution must be made: the theme of the concrete (nonformal)

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tautology or of false (finite) heterology—this very difficult theme is proposed rather discreetly at the beginning of Totality and Infinity, but it conditions every affirmation made in the book. If negativity (work, history, etc.) never has a relation to the other, if the other is not the simple negation of the same, then neither separation nor metaphysical transcendence can be conceived under the category of negativity. Just as—as we saw above—simple internal consciousness could not provide itself with time and with the absolute alterity of every instant without the irruption of the totally-other, so the ego cannot engender alterity within itself without encountering the Other. If one is not convinced by these initial propositions authorizing the equation of the ego and the same, one never will be. If one does not follow Levinas when he affirms that the things offered to work or to desire—in the Hegelian sense: for example, natural objectivity—belong to the ego, to the ego’s economy (to the same), and do not offer the absolute resistance reserved for the other (Others); if one is tempted to think that this last resistance supposes, in its innermost meaning, the possibility of the resistance of things—the existence of the world which is not myself and in which I am, in as original a way as one may wish, for example as origin of the world within the world, although it is not to be confused with this possibility; if one does not follow Levinas when he affirms that the true resistance to the same is not that of things, is not real but rather is intelligible,24 and if one rebels against the notion of a purely intelligible resistance, then in all these cases one will follow Levinas no further. Nor will one be able to follow, without an indefinable malaise, the conceptual operations liberated by the classical dissymetry of the same and other, as they are overturned; or (as a classical mind would say), while they feign permitting themselves to be overturned, all the while remaining the same, impassive beneath an algebraic substitution. What, then, is this encounter with the absolutely-other? Neither representation, nor limitation, nor conceptual relation to the same. The ego and the other do not permit themselves to be dominated or made into totalities by a concept of relationship. And first of all because the concept (material of language), which is always given to the other, cannot encompass the other, cannot include the other. The dative or vocative dimension which opens the original direction of language, cannot lend

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118 writing and difference itself to inclusion in and modification by the accusative or attributive dimension of the object without violence. Language, therefore, cannot make its own possibility a totality and include within itself its own origin or its own end. Truthfully, one does not have to wonder what this encounter is. It is the encounter, the only way out, the only adventuring outside oneself toward the unforeseeably-other. Without hope of return. In every sense of this expression, which is why this eschatology which awaits nothing sometimes appears infinitely hopeless. Truthfully, in La trace de l’autre eschatology does not only “appear” hopeless. It is given as such, and renunciation belongs to its essential meaning. In describing liturgy, desire, and the work of art as ruptures of the Economy and the Odyssey, as the impossibility of return to the same, Levinas speaks of an “eschatology without hope for the self or without liberation in my time.” Therefore, there is no way to conceptualize the encounter: it is made possible by the other, the unforeseeable “resistant to all categories.” Concepts suppose an anticipation, a horizon within which alterity is amortized as soon as it is announced precisely because it has let itself be foreseen. The infinitely-other cannot be bound by a concept, cannot be thought on the basis of a horizon; for a horizon is always a horizon of the same, the elementary unity within which eruptions and surprises are always welcomed by understanding and recognized. Thus we are obliged to think in opposition to the truisms which we believed— which we still cannot not believe—to be the very ether of our thought and language. To attempt to think the opposite is stifling. And it is a question not only of thinking the opposite which is still in complicity with the classical alternatives, but of liberating thought and its language for the encounter occurring beyond these alternatives. Doubtless this encounter, which for the first time does not take the form of an intuitive contact (in ethics, in the sense given to it by Levinas, the principal, central prohibition is that of contact) but the form of a separation (encounter as separation, another rupture of “formal logic”).25 Doubtless this encounter of the unforeseeable itself is the only possible opening of time, the only pure future, the only pure expenditure beyond history as economy. But this future, this beyond, is not another time, a day after history. It is present at the heart of experience.

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Present not as a total presence but as a trace. Therefore, before all dogmas, all conversions, all articles of faith or philosophy, experience itself is eschatological at its origin and in each of its aspects. Face to face with the other within a glance and a speech which both maintain distance and interrupt all totalities, this being-together as separation precedes or exceeds society, collectivity, community. Levinas calls it religion. It opens ethics. The ethical relation is a religious relation (Difficile liberté [hereafter DL]). Not a religion, but the religion, the religiosity of the religious. This transcendence beyond negativity is not accomplished by an intuition of a positive presence; it “only institutes language at the point where neither no nor yes is the first word” (TI) but an interrogation. Not a theoretical interrogation, however, but a total question, a distress and denuding, a supplication, a demanding prayer addressed to a freedom, that is, to a commandment: the only possible ethical imperative, the only incarnated nonviolence in that it is respect for the other. An immediate respect for the other himself—one might say, although without following any literal indication by Levinas—because it does not pass through the neutral element of the universal, and through respect—in the Kantian sense26— for the law. This restitution of metaphysics then permits the radicalization and systematization of the previous reductions of phenomenology and ontology. The act of seeing is at the outset a respectful knowledge, and light passes for the medium which—as faithfully and neutrally as possible, as a third party—permits the known to be. It is not by chance that the theoretical relation has been the preferred framework of the metaphysical relation (cf. TI). When the third term, in its most neutral indetermination, is the light of Being—which is neither a being nor a non-being, while the same and the other are—the theoretical relation is ontology. According to Levinas, the latter always brings the other back into the midst of the same and does so for the benefit of the unity of Being. And the theoretical freedom which acceeds to the thought of Being is but the identification of the same, the light in which I provide myself with what I claim to encounter, that is, an economic freedom, in the particular sense Levinas gives to this word. A freedom in immanence, a premetaphysical, one could almost say a physical freedom, an empirical freedom, even if it is called reason within history. Reason would be nature. Metaphysics begins when theory criticizes itself as

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120 writing and difference ontology, as the dogmatism and spontaneity of the same, and when metaphysics, in departing from itself, lets itself be put into question by the other in the movement of ethics. Although in fact it is secondary, metaphysics as the critique of ontology is rightfully and philosophically primary. If it is true that “Western philosophy most often has been an ontology” dominated since Socrates by a Reason which receives only what it gives itself,27 a Reason which does nothing but recall itself to itself, and if ontology is tautotology and egology, then it has always neutralized the other, in every sense of the word. Phenomenological neutralization, one might be tempted to say, gives the most subtle and modern form to this historical, political and authoritarian neutralization. Only metaphysics can free the other from the light of Being or from the phenomenon which “takes away from Being its resistance.” Heideggerean “ontology,” despite its seductive appearance, would not escape this framework. It would still remain “egology” and even “egoism”: “Sein und Zeit has argued perhaps but one sole thesis: Being is inseparable from the comprehension of Being (which unfolds as time); Being is already an appeal to subjectivity. The primacy of ontology for Heidegger does not rest on the truism: ‘to know the existent it is necessary to have comprehended the Being of the existent.’ To affirm the priority of Being over the existent is, indeed, to decide the essence of philosophy; it is to subordinate the relation with someone, who is an existent (the ethical relation), to a relation with the Being of the existent, which, impersonal, permits the apprehension, the domination of the existent (a relationship of knowing), subordinates justice to freedom. . . the mode of remaining the same in the midst of the other” (TI, p. 45). Despite all the misunderstandings which may be embedded in this treatment of Heideggerean thought—we will study them for themselves later—Levinas’s intention, in any event, seems clear. The neutral thought of Being neutralizes the Other as a being: “Ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power” (TI, p. 46), a philosophy of the neutral, the tyranny of the state as an anonymous and inhuman universality. Here we find the premises for a critique of the state’s alienation whose anti-Hegelianism would be neither subjectivist, nor Marxist; nor anarchist, for it is a philosophy of the “principle, which can be only as a commandment.” The Heideggerean “possibilities” remain powers. Although they are pretechnical and preobjective, they are

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nonetheless oppressive and possessive. By another paradox, the philosophy of the neutral communicates with a philosophy of the site, of rootedness, of pagan violence, of ravishment, of enthusiasm, a philosophy offered up to the sacred, that is, to the anonymous divinity, the divinity without the Deity (DL). It is a “shameful materialism” in that it is complete, for at heart materialism is not primarily sensualism, but a recognized primacy of the neutral (TI). The notion of primacy, employed so frequently by Levinas, well translates the gesture of his entire critique. According to the indication present in the notion of archia, the philosophical beginning is immediately transposed into an ethical or philosophical command. From the very first, primacy indicates principle and chief. All the classical concepts interrogated by Levinas are thus dragged toward the agora, summoned to justify themselves in an ethico-political language that they have not always sought—or believed that they sought—to speak, summoned to transpose themselves into this language by confessing their violent aims. Yet they already spoke this language in the city, and spoke it well, by means of the detours of philosophy and despite philosophy’s apparent disinterest, notwithstanding its eventual return to power. Here we find the premises for a non-Marxist reading of philosophy as ideology. The ways chosen by Levinas are decidedly difficult: rejecting idealism and the philosophies of subjectivity, he must also denounce the neutrality of a “Logos which is the verb of no one” (TI). (It could no doubt be demonstrated that Levinas, uncomfortably situated in the difference between Husserl and Heidegger—and, indeed, by virtue of the history of his thought—always criticizes the one in a style and according to a scheme borrowed from the other, and finishes by sending them off into the wings together as partners in the “play of the same” and as accomplices in the same historico-philosophical coup.) The verb must not only be the verb of someone—it must overflow, in its movement toward the other, what is called the speaking subject. Neither the philosophies of the neutral nor the philosophies of subjectivity can acknowledge this trajectory of speech that no speech can make into a totality. By definition, if the other is the other, and if all speech is for the other, no logos as absolute knowledge can comprehend dialogue and the trajectory toward the other. This incomprehensibility, this rupture of logos is not the beginning of irrationalism but the wound or inspiration which opens speech and

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122 writing and difference then makes possible every logos or every rationalism. A total logos still, in order to be logos, would have to let itself be proffered toward the other beyond its own totality. If, for example, there is an ontology or a logos of the comprehension of the Being (of beings), it is in that “already the comprehension of Being is said to the existent, who again arises behind the theme in which he is presented. This ‘saying to the other’—this relationship to the other as interlocutor, this relation with an existent—precedes all ontology; it is the ultimate relation in Being. Ontology presupposes metaphysics” (TI, pp. 47–48). “Prior to the unveiling of Being in general, as the basis of knowledge and meaning of Being, there is a relationship with the existent which is expressed; before the ontological level, the ethical level.” Ethics is therefore metaphysics. “Morality is not a branch of philosophy, but first philosophy.” The absolute overflowing of ontology—as the totality and unity of the same: Being—by the other occurs as infinity because no totality can constrain it. The infinity irreducible to the representation of infinity, the infinity exceeding the ideation in which it is thought, thought of as more than I can think, as that which cannot be an object or a simple “objective reality” of the idea—such is the pole of metaphysical transcendence. After the epekeina tes ousias, the Cartesian idea of infinity made metaphysics emerge for a second time in Western ontology. But what neither Plato nor Descartes recognized (along with several others, if we may be permitted not to believe to the same extent as Levinas in their solitude among the philosophical crowd which understands neither true transcendence nor the strange idea of Infinity) is that the expression of this infinity is the face. The face is not only a visage which may be the surface of things or animal facies, aspect, or species. It is not only, following the origin of the word, what is seen, seen because it is naked. It is also that which sees. Not so much that which sees things—a theoretical relation—but that which exchanges its glance. The visage is a face only in the face-to-face. As Scheler said (but our citation must not make us forget that Levinas is nothing less than Schelerian): “I see not only the eyes of an other, I see also that he looks at me.” Did not Hegel say this too? “If we ask ourselves now in which particular organ the soul appears as such in its entirety we shall at once point to the eye. For in the eye the soul concentrates itself; it not merely

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uses the eye as its instrument, but is itself therein manifest. We have, however, already stated, when referring to the external covering of the human body, that in contrast with the bodies of animals, the heart of life pulses through and throughout it. And in much the same sense it can be asserted of art that it has to invent every point of the external appearance into the direct testimony of the human eye, which is the source of soul-life, and reveals spirit.”28 This is perhaps the occasion to emphasize, concerning a precise point, a theme that we will enlarge upon later: Levinas is very close to Hegel, much closer than he admits, and at the very moment when he is apparently opposed to Hegel in the most radical fashion. This is a situation he must share with all antiHegelian thinkers, and whose final significance calls for much thought. Here, in particular, on the relations between desire and the eye, between sound and theory, the convergence is as profound as the difference, being neither simply added to nor juxtaposed with it. In effect, like Levinas Hegel thought that the eye, not aiming at “consumption,” suspends desire. It is the very limit of desire (and perhaps, thereby, its resource) and is the first theoretical sense. We must not conceive light and the eye’s opening on the basis of any physiology, but on the basis of the relation between death and desire. After having spoken of taste, touch, and smell, Hegel again writes, in the Aesthetics: “Sight, on the other hand, possesses a purely ideal relation to objects by means of light, a material which is at the same time immaterial, and which suffers on its part the objects to continue in their free selfsubsistence, making them appear and reappear, but which does not, as the atmosphere or fire does, consume them actively either by imperceptible degrees or patently. Everything, then is an object of the appetiteless vision, [la vue exempte de désirs] which, however, in so far as it remains unimpaired in its integrity, merely is disclosed in its form and colour.”29 This neutralization of desire is what makes sight excellent for Hegel. But for Levinas, this neutralization is also, and for the same reasons, the first violence, even though the face is not what it is when the glance is absent. Violence, then, would be the solitude of a mute glance, of a face without speech, the abstraction of seeing. According to Levinas the glance by itself, contrary to what one may be led to believe, does not respect the other. Respect, beyond grasp and contact, beyond touch, smell and

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124 writing and difference taste, can be only as desire, and metaphysical desire does not seek to consume, as do Hegelian desire or need. This is why Levinas places sound above light. (“Thought is language and is thought in an element analogous to sound and not to light.” What does this analogy mean here, a difference and a resemblance, a relation between the sensible sound and the sound of thought as intelligible speech, between sensibility and signification, the senses and sense? This is a question also posed by Hegel, admiring the word Sinn.) In Totality and Infinity the movement of metaphysics is thus also the transcendence of hearing in relation to seeing. But in Hegel’s Aesthetics too: “The remaining ideal sense is hearing. This is in signal contrast to the one just described. Hearing is concerned with the tone, rather than the form and colour of an object, with the vibration of what is corporeal; it requires no process of dissolution, as the sense of smell requires, but merely a trembling of the object, by which the same is in no wise impoverished. This ideal motion, in which through its sound what is as it were the simple individuality [subjectivité] the soul of the material thing expresses itself, the ear receives also in an ideal way, just as the eye shape and colour, and suffers thereby what is ideal or not external in the object to appeal to what is spiritual or non-corporeal.”30 But: Hearing, which, as also the sight, does not belong to the senses of action [sens pratiques] but those of contemplation [sens théoriques]; and is, in fact, still more ideal than sight. For the unruffled, aesthetic observation of works of art no doubt permits the objects to stand out quietly in their freedom just as they are without any desire to impair that effect in any way; but that which it apprehends is not that which is itself essentially ideally composed, but rather on the contrary, that which receives its consistency in its sensuous existence. The ear, on the contrary, receives the result of that ideal vibration of material substance, without placing itself in a practical relation towards the objects, a result by means of which it is no longer the material object in its repose, but the first example of the more ideal activity of the soul itself which is apprehended.31

The question of the analogy would thus lead us back to the notion of trembling, which seems to us decisive in Hegel’s Aesthetics in that it opens

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the passage to ideality. Further, in order to confront systematically Hegel’s and Levinas’s thoughts on the theme of the face, one would have to consult not only the pages of the Phenomenology of the Mind devoted to physiognomy, but also paragraph 411 of the Encyclopedia on mind, face, and language. For reasons now familiar to us, the face-to-face eludes every category. For within it the face is given simultaneously as expression and as speech. Not only as glance, but as the original unity of glance and speech, eyes and mouth, that speaks, but also pronounces its hunger. Thus it is also that which hears the invisible, for “thought is language,” and “is thought in an element analogous to sound and not to light.” This unity of the face precedes, in its signification, the dispersion of senses and organs of sensibility. Its signification is therefore irreducible. Moreover, the face does not signify. It does not incarnate, envelop, or signal anything other than self, soul, subjectivity, etc. Thought is speech, and is therefore immediately face. In this, the thematic of the face belongs to the most modern philosophy of language and of the body itself. The other is not signaled by his face, he is this face: “Absolutely present, in his face, the Other—without any metaphor—faces me.”32 The other, therefore, is given “in person” and without allegory only in the face. Let us recall what Feuerbach, who also made the themes of height, substance, and face communicate with each other, said on this subject: “That which is situated highest in space is also in its quality the highest part of man, that which is closest to him, that which one can no longer separate from him—and this is his head. If I see a man’s head, it is the man himself who I see; but if I only see his torso, I see no more than his torso.”33 That which can no longer be separated from. . . is substance in its essential predicates and “in itself.” Levinas also often says kath’auto and “substance” in speaking of the other as face. The face is presence, ousia. The face is not a metaphor, not a figure. The discourse on the face is neither allegory nor, as one might be tempted to believe, prosopopoeia. Consequently the height of the face (in relation to the rest of the body) perhaps determines in part (in part only, as we will see later) the expression most-high which we examined above. If the height of the mosthigh, as we might be tempted to say, does not belong to space (and this is why the superlative must destroy space as it constructs the metaphor),

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126 writing and difference it is not because it is foreign to space, but because (within) space it is the origin of space, orienting space through speech and glance, through the face, the chief who commands body and space from above. (Aristotle, indeed, compares the transcendental principle of the good to the chief of the armies; however, he overlooks both the face, and the fact that the god of the armies is the Face.) The face does not signify, does not present itself as a sign, but expresses itself, offering itself in person, in itself, kath’auto: “the thing in itself expresses itself.” To express oneself is to be behind the sign. To be behind the sign: is this not, first of all, to be capable of attending (to) one’s speech, to assist it, according to the expression used in the Phaedrus as argument against Theuth (or Hermes)—an expression Levinas makes his own on several occasions. Only living speech, in its mastery and magisteriality, is able to assist itself; and only living speech is expression and not a servile sign—on the condition that it is truly speech, “the creative voice, and not the accomplice voice which is a servant” (E. Jabès). And we know that all the gods of writing (Greece, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia) have the status of auxiliary gods, servile secretaries of the great god, lunar and clever couriers who occasionally dethrone the king of the gods by dishonorable means. The written and the work are not expressions but signs for Levinas. Along with the reference to the epekeina tes ousias, this is at very least the second Platonic theme of Totality and Infinity. It is also to be found in Nicholas of Cusa. “While the worker abandons his work, which then pursues its independent destiny, the verb of the professor is inseparable from the very person who proffers it.”34 The critique of the work thus implied separates Hegel from Nicholas of Cusa for one time at least. This problematic requires separate consideration in and of itself. Is “oral discourse” “the plenitude of discourse?” Or, is it, in another sense, the “speech activity” in which I “am absent, missing from my products” which then betray me more than they express me? Is the “frankness” of expression essentially an aspect of living speech for him who is not God? This question is meaningless for Levinas, who conceives the face in terms of the “resemblance” of man and God. Are not weight and magisterial instruction an aspect of writing? Is it not possible to invert all of Levinas’s statements on this point? By showing, for example, that writing can assist itself, for it has time and freedom,

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escaping better than speech from empirical urgencies. That, by neutralizing the demands of empirical “economy,” writing’s essence is more “metaphysical” (in Levinas’s sense) than speech? That the writer absents himself better, that is, expresses himself better as other, addresses himself to the other more effectively than the man of speech? And that, in depriving himself of the enjoyments and effects of his signs, the writer more effectively renounces violence? It is true that he perhaps intends only to multiply his signs to infinity, thus forgetting—at very least—the other, the infinitely other as death, and thus practicing writing as deferral and as an economy of death. The limit between violence and nonviolence is perhaps not between speech and writing but within each of them. The thematic of the trace (which Levinas distinguishes from the effect, the path, or the sign which is not related to the other as the invisible absolute) should lead to a certain rehabilitation of writing. Is not the “He” whom transcendence and generous absence uniquely announce in the trace more readily the author of writing than of speech? The work, trans-economy, the pure expenditure as determined by Levinas, is neither play nor death. It is not simply to be confused with either the letter or with speech. It is not a sign, and therefore its concept cannot include the concept of the work found in Totality and Infinity. Levinas is thus at once quite close to and quite far from Nietzsche and Bataille. Maurice Blanchot speaks of his disagreement with this preeminence of oral discourse, which resembles “the tranquil humanist and socratic speech which brings us close to the speaker.”35 Moreover, how could Hebraism belittle the letter, in praise of which Levinas writes so well? For example: “To admit the action of literature on men—this is perhaps the ultimate wisdom of the West, in which the people of the Bible will be recognized” (DL); and “The spirit is free in the letter, and subjugated in the root”; and then, “To love the Torah more than God” is “protection against the madness of a direct contact with the Sacred” (DL). The aspect of living and original speech itself which Levinas seeks to save is clear. Without its possibility, outside its horizon, writing is nothing. In this sense, writing will always be secondary. To liberate it from this possibility and this horizon, from this essential secondariness, is to deny it as writing, and to leave room for a grammar or a lexicon without language, for cybernetics or electronics. But it is only

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128 writing and difference in God that speech, as presence, as the origin and horizon of writing, is realized without defect. One would have to be able to show that only this reference to the speech of God distinguishes Levinas’s intentions from those of Socrates in the Phaedrus; and that for a thought of original finitude this distinction is no longer possible. And that if writing is secondary at this point, nothing, however, has occurred before it. As for Levinas’s ties to Blanchot, it seems to us that despite the frequent rapprochements he proposes, the profound and incontestable affinities between them all belong to the critical and negative moment, within the hollow space of finitude in which messianic eschatology comes to resonate, within the expectation of expectation in which Levinas has begun to hear a response. This response is still called expectation, of course, but Levinas no longer has to await it. The affinity ceases, it seems to us, at the moment when eschatalogical positivity retrospectively comes to illuminate the common route, to lift the finitude and pure negativity of the question, when the neutral is determined. Blanchot could probably extend over all of Levinas’s propositions what he says about the dissymetry within the space of communication: “Here, I believe, is what is decisive in the affirmation which we must hear, and which must be maintained independently of the theological context in which it occurs.” But is this possible? Independent of its “theological context” (an expression that Levinas would most likely reject) does not this entire discourse collapse? To be behind the sign which is in the world is afterward to remain invisible to the world within epiphany. In the face, the other is given over in person as other, that is, as that which does not reveal itself, as that which cannot be made thematic. I could not possibly speak of the Other, make of the Other a theme, pronounce the Other as object, in the accusative. I can only, I must only speak to the other; that is, I must call him in the vocative, which is not a category, a case of speech, but, rather the bursting forth, the very raising up of speech. Categories must be missing for the Other not to be overlooked; but for the Other not to be overlooked, He must present himself as absence, and must appear as nonphenomenal. Always behind its signs and its works, always within its secret interior, and forever discreet, interrupting all historical totalities through its freedom of speech, the face is not “of this world.” It is the origin of the world. I can speak of it only by speaking to it; and I may

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reach it only as I must reach it. But I must only reach it as the inaccessible, the invisible, the intangible. Secret, separate, invisible like Gyjès (“the very condition of man”)—this is the very state, the very status of what is called the psyche. This absolute separation, this natural atheism, this lying freedom in which truth and discourse take root—all this is a “great glory for the creator.” An affirmation which, for once at least, is hardly disorienting. For the face to present the other without metaphor, speech must not only translate thought. Thought, of course, already must be speech, but above all the body must also remain a language. Rational knowledge must not be the first word of words. If one is to believe Levinas, Husserl and Heidegger, at bottom, accepted the classical subordination of language to thought, and body to language. On the contrary, MerleauPonty, “better than others,” would have shown “that disincarnated thought, thinking of speech before speaking it, thought as constitutive of the world of speech, was a myth.” But by the force of a movement proper to Levinas, he accepts this extreme “modern” audacity only to redirect it toward an infinitism that this audacity itself must suppose, according to himself; and the form of this infinitism is often quite classical, pre-Kantian rather than Hegelian. Thus, the themes of one’s own body as language and as intentionality cannot get around the classical dangers, and thought cannot first be language unless it is acknowledged that thought is first and irreducibly a relation to the other (which it seems to us did not escape Merleau-Ponty);36 but a relation to an irreducible other who summons me without possibility of return from without, for in this order is presented the infinity which no thought can enclose and which forbids all monologue “even if it had ‘the corporal intentionality’ of Merleau-Ponty.” Despite all appearances and all habitual thinking, it must be acknowledged here that the dissociation of thought and language, and the subordination of the latter to the former, are proper to a philosophy of finitude. And this demonstration would refer us once more to the Cartesian Cogito of the third Meditation, beyond Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Husserl. And does so according to a schema that seems to us to support the entirety of Levinas’s thought: the other is the other only if his alterity is absolutely irreducible, that is, infinitely irreducible; and the infinitely Other can only be Infinity.

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130 writing and difference As speech and glance the face is not in the world, since it opens and exceeds the totality. This is why it marks the limit of all power, of all violence, and the origin of the ethical. In a sense, murder is always directed against the face, but thereby always misses it. “Murder exerts a power over that which escapes power. Still, a power, for the face expresses itself in the sensible; but already impotence, because the face rips apart the sensible.” “The Other is the only being who I may wish to kill,” but the only one, also, who orders that “thou shalt commit no murders,” and thus absolutely limits my power. Not by opposing me with another force in the world, but by speaking to me, and by looking at me from an other origin of the world, from that which no finite power can restrict: the strange, unthinkable notion of unreal resistance. Since his 1953 article (already cited), Levinas no longer, to our knowledge, speaks of “intelligible resistance”— an expression whose sense still belongs at least literally, to the realm of the same, and which was utilized, apparently, only to signify an unreal resistance. In Totality and Infinity Levinas speaks of “ethical resistance.” That which escapes the concept as power, therefore, is not existence in general, but the existence of the Other. And first of all because, despite all appearances, there is no concept of the Other. We would have to reflect upon this word “Other” [Autrui] in an artisan-like way, in the realm where philosophy and philology constrain each other, uniting their concerns and their rigor—this word “Other” circumscribed in silence by the capital letter which ever increases the neutrality of the other, and which we use so familiarly, even though it is the very disorder of our conceptuality. Is it only a common noun without concept? But, first of all, is it a noun? It is not an adjective, or a pronoun; therefore it is a substantive—and such it is classed by the dictionaries—but a substantive which is not, as usual, a species of noun: neither common noun, for it cannot take, as in the category of the other in general, the heteron, the definite article. Nor the plural. “In the chancellery location l’autrui [the Other], le must not be understood as the article of autrui: implied is property, rights: the property, the rights of Others,” notes Littré, who began thus: “Autrui, from alter-huic, this other, in regimen: this is why autrui is always in regimen, and why autrui is less general than les autres [the others].” Thus, without making language the accident of thought, we would have to account for this: that, within

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language, that which is always “in regimen” and in the least generality is, in its meaning, undeclinable and beyond genre. What is the origin of this case of meaning in language, of this regimen in which language places meaning? Nor is autrui a proper noun, even though its anonymity signifies but the unnamable source of every proper noun. We would have to examine patiently what emerges in language when the Greek conception of heteron seems to run out of breath when faced by the alterhuic; what happens when the heteron seems to become incapable of mastering what it alone, however, is able to precomprehend by concealing it as alterity (other in general), and which, in return, will reveal to heteron its irreducible center of meaning (the other as Other [autrui]). We would have to examine the complicity of the concealment and the precomprehension which does not occur within a conceptual movement, for the French word autrui does not designate a category of the genre autre. We would have to examine this thought of the other in general (which is not a genre), the Greek thought within which this nonspecific difference realizes (itself in) our history. Or, rather: what does autre mean before its Greek determination as heteron, and its JudeoChristian determination as autrui? This is the kind of question which Levinas seems to contest profoundly: according to him, only the irruption of the Other permits access to the absolute and to the irreducible alterity of the other. We would have to examine, therefore, this Huic of autrui whose transcendence is not yet that of a thou. Here, Levinas’s opposition to Buber or to Gabriel Marcel becomes meaningful. After opposing the magisterial height of the You to the intimate reciprocity of the Me-Thou (TI), Levinas seems to move toward a philosophy of the Ille, of the He (Il) in his meditation of the Trace (that is, of the neighbor as a distant stranger, according to the original ambiguity of the word translated as the “neighbor” to be loved). A philosophy of the He who would not be an impersonal object opposed to the thou, but the invisible transcendence of the Other.37 If the face’s expression is not revelation, then the unrevealable is expressed beyond all thematization, beyond all constitutive analysis, all phenomenology. At its various stages, the transcendental constitution of the alter ego—of which Husserl attempts to reassemble the description in the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations—would presuppose that whose genesis it allegedly traces (according to Levinas). The Other could not be constituted as an alter

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132 writing and difference ego, as a phenomenon of the ego, by and for a nomadic subject proceeding by appresentative analogy. All the difficulties encountered by Husserl could be “surmounted” if the ethical relationship were recognized as the original face-to-face, as the emergence of absolute alterity, the emergence of an exteriority which can be neither derived, nor engendered, nor constituted on the basis of anything other than itself. An absolute outside, an exteriority infinitely overflowing the monad of the ego cogito. Here again, Descartes against Husserl, the Descartes of the Third Meditation allegedly misconstrued by Husserl. While Descartes, in his reflections on the cogito, becomes aware that infinity not only cannot be constituted as a (dubitable) object, but has already made infinity possible as a cogito overflowing the object, (a nonspatial overflowing, against which metaphor shatters), Husserl, on the other hand, “sees in the cogito a subjectivity with no support from without, constituting the idea of infinity itself, and providing himself with it as object” (TI). Now, the infinite(-ly other) cannot be an object because it is speech, the origin of meaning and the world. Therefore, no phenomenology can account for ethics, speech, and justice. But if all justice begins with speech, all speech is not just. Rhetoric may amount to the violence of theory, which reduces the other when it leads the other, whether through psychology, demagogy, or even pedagogy which is not instruction. The latter descends from the heights of the master, whose absolute exteriority does not impair the disciple’s freedom. Beyond rhetoric, speech uncovers the nudity of the face, without which no nudity would have any meaning. All nudity, “even the nudity of the body experienced in shame,” is a “figure of speech” in relation to the nonmetaphorical nudity of the face. This is already quite explicit in Is Ontology Fundamental? “The nudity of the face is not a stylistic figure.” And it is shown, still in the form of negative theology, that this nudity is not even an opening, for an opening is relative to a “surrounding plenitude.” The word “nudity” thus destroys itself after serving to indicate something beyond itself. An entire reading and interrogation of Totality and Infinity could be developed around this affirmation. For this affirmation seems to us quite implicitly—perhaps even too implicitly—to support the decisive division between what Levinas calls the face and that which is Beyond the Face, the section which considers, aside from the Phenomenology of Eros, Love, Fecundity, and

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Time. This nudity of the face, speech, and glance, being neither theory nor theorem, is offered and exposed as denuding, as demanding supplication, as the unthinkable unity of a speech able to assist itself and a glance which calls for assistance. Asymmetry, non-light, and commandment then would be violence and injustice themselves—and, indeed, so they are commonly understood—if they established relations between finite beings, or if the other was but a negative determination of the (finite or infinite) same. But we have seen that this is not the case. Infinity (as infinitely other) cannot be violent as is totality (which is thus always defined by Levinas, always determined by an option, that is, an initial decision of his discourse, as finite totality: totality, for Levinas, means a finite totality. This functions as a silent axiom.) This is why God alone keeps Levinas’s world from being a world of the pure and worst violence, a world of immorality itself. The structures of living and naked experience described by Levinas are the very structures of a world in which war would rage—strange conditional—if the infinitely other were not infinity, if there were, by chance, one naked man, finite and alone. But in this case, Levinas would no doubt say, there no longer would be any war, for there would be neither face nor true asymmetry. Therefore the naked and living experience in which God has already begun to speak could no longer be our concern. In other words, in a world where the face would be fully respected (as that which is not of this world), there no longer would be war. In a world where the face no longer would be absolutely respected, where there no longer would be a face, there would be no more cause for war. God, therefore, is implicated in war. His name too, like the name of peace, is a function within the system of war, the only system whose basis permits us to speak, the only system whose language may ever be spoken. With or without God, there would be no war. War supposes and excludes God. We can have a relation to God only within such a system. Therefore war—for war there is—is the difference between the face and the finite world without a face. But is not this difference that which has always been called the world, in which the absence-presence of God plays? Only the play of the world permits us to think the essence of God. In a sense that our language—and Levinas’s also—accommodates poorly the play of the world precedes God.

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134 writing and difference The face-to-face, then, is not originally determined by Levinas as the vis-à-vis of two equal and upright men. The latter supposes the face-toface of the man with bent neck and eyes raised toward the God on high. Language is indeed the possibility of the face-to-face and of being-upright, but it does not exclude inferiority, the humility of the glance at the father as the glance of the child made in memory of having been expulsed before knowing how to walk, and of having been delivered, prone and infans, into the hands of the adult masters. Man, one might say, is a God arrived too early, that is, a God who knows himself forever late in relation to the already-there of Being. But it is certain that these last remarks—and this is the least one might say—do not belong to the genre of commentary. And we are not referring, here, to the themes known under the name of psychoanalysis, nor to the embryological or anthropological hypothesis on the structurally premature birth of man’s offspring. Let it suffice us to know that man is born.38 God’s name is often mentioned, but this return to experience, and to “things themselves,” as a relation to the infinite(ly) other is not theological, even if it alone is capable, afterward, of founding theological discourse, which up to now has “imprudently considered the idea of the relationship between God and creation in ontological terms” (TI). The foundation of metaphysics—in Levinas’s sense—is to be encountered in the return to things themselves, where we find the common root of humanism and theology: the resemblance between man and God, man’s visage and the Face of God. “The Other resembles God” (ibid.). Via the passageway of this resemblance, man’s speech can be lifted up toward God, an almost unheard of analogy which is the very movement of Levinas’s discourse on discourse. Analogy as dialogue with God: “Discourse is discourse with God. . . . Metaphysics is the essence of this language with God.” Discourse with God, and not in God as participation. Discourse with God, and not discourse on God and his attributes as theology. And the dissymetry of my relation to the other, this “curvature of inter-subjective space signifies the divine intention of all truth.” It “is, perhaps, the very presence of God.” Presence as separation, presence-absence—again the break with Parmenides, Spinoza and Hegel, which only “the idea of creation ex nihilo” can consummate. Presence as separation, presence-absence as resemblance, but a resem-

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blance which is not the “ontological mark” of the worker imprinted on his product, or on “beings created in his image and resemblance” (Malebranche);39 a resemblance which can be understood neither in terms of communion or knowledge, nor in terms of participation and incarnation. A resemblance which is neither a sign nor an effect of God. Neither the sign nor the effect exceeds the same. We are “in the Trace of God.” A proposition which risks incompatability with every allusion to the “very presence of God.” A proposition readily converted into atheism: and if God was an effect of the trace? If the idea of divine presence (life, existence, parousia, etc.), if the name of God was but the movement of erasure of the trace in presence? Here it is a question of knowing whether the trace permits us to think presence in its system, or whether the reverse order is the true one. It is doubtless the true order. But it is indeed the order of truth which is in question. Levinas’s thought is maintained between these two postulations. The face of God disappears forever in showing itself. Thus are reassembled in the unity of their metaphysical signification, at the very heart of the experience denuded by Levinas, the diverse evocations of the Face of Yahweh, who of course is never named in Totality and Infinity. The face of Yahweh is the total person and the total presence of “the Eternal speaking face to face with Moses,” but saying to him also: “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall be no man see me and live. . . . thou shalt stand upon a rock: and it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen” (Exodus 33:20–23). The face of God which commands while hiding itself is at once more and less a face than all faces. Whence, perhaps, despite all Levinas’s precautions, the equivocal complicity of theology and metaphysics in Totality and Infinity. Would Levinas subscribe to this infinitely ambiguous sentence from the Book of Questions by Edmond Jabès: “All faces are His; this is why HE has no face”? The face is neither the face of God nor the figure of man: it is their resemblance. A resemblance which, however, we must think before, or without, the assistance of the Same.40

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136 writing and difference III DIFFERENCE AND ESCHATOLOGY The questions whose principles we now will attempt to indicate are all, in several senses, questions of language: questions of language and the question of language. But if our commentary has not been too unfaithful, it is already clear that there is no element of Levinas’s thought which is not, in and of itself, engaged by such questions. Of the original polemic First, let it be said, for our own reassurance: the route followed by Levinas’s thought is such that all our questions already belong to his own interior dialogue, are displaced into his discourse and only listen to it, from many vantage points and in many ways. A. Thus, for example, De l’existence à l’existant and Le temps et l’autre seemed to proscribe the “logic of genre,” as well as the categories of the Same and Other. These lacked the originality of the experience to which Levinas wished to lead us back: “To the cosmos which is Plato’s world is opposed the world of the mind, in which the implications of eros are not reduced to the logic of genre, in which the ego is substituted for the same, and Others for the other.” Now, in Totality and Infinity, where the categories of Same and Other return in force, the vis demonstrandi and very energy of the break with tradition is precisely the adequation of Ego to the Same, and of Others to the Other. Without using these terms themselves, Levinas often warned us against confusing identity and ipseity, Same and Ego: idem and ipse. This confusion, which, in a certain way, is immediately practiced by the Greek concept of autos and the German concept of selbst, does not occur as spontaneously in French; nevertheless, it returns as a kind of silent axiom in Totality and Infinity41. We have seen this: according to Levinas there would be no interior difference, no fundamental and autochthonous alterity within the ego. If, formerly, interiority, the secret and original separation, had permitted the break with the classical use of the Greek concepts of Same and Other, the amalgamation of Same and Ego (Same and Ego homogenized, and homogenized with the concept, as well as with the finite totality) now permits Levinas to include within the same condemna-

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tion both the Greek and the most modern philosophies of subjectivity, the philosophies most careful to distinguish, as did Levinas previously, the Ego from the Same and Others from the other. Without close attention to this double movement, to this progress which seems to contest its own condition and its own initial stage, we would miss the originality of this protest against the concept, the state and totality: it is not made, as is generally the case, in the name of subjective existence, but against it. Simultaneously against Hegel and against Kierkegaard. Levinas often warns us against confusing—as one is so tempted to do—his anti-Hegelianism with a subjectivism, or with a Kierkegaardian type of existentialism, both of which would remain, according to Levinas, violent and premetaphysical egoisms. “It is not I who do not accept the system, as Kierkegaard thought, it is the other.” Can one not wager that Kierkegaard would have been deaf to this distinction? And that he, in turn, would have protested against this conceptuality? It as subjective existence, he would have remarked perhaps, that the other does not accept the system. The other is not myself—and who has ever maintained that it is?—but it is an Ego, as Levinas must suppose in order to maintain his own discourse. The passage from Ego to other as an Ego is the passage to the essential, non-empirical egoity of subjective existence in general. The philosopher Kierkegaard does not only plead for Sören Kierkegaard, (“the egoistic cry of a subjectivity still concerned with Kierkegaard’s happiness or salvation”), but for subjective existence in general (a noncontradictory expression); this is why his discourse is philosophical, and not in the realm of empirical egoism. The name of a philosophical subject, when he says I, is always, in a certain way, a pseudonym. This is a truth that Kierkegaard adopted systematically, even while protesting against the “possibilization” of individual existence which resists the concept. And is not this essence of subjective existence presupposed by the respect for the other, which can be what it is—the other—only as subjective existence? In order to reject the Kierkegaardian notion of subjective existence Levinas should eliminate even the notions of an essence and a truth of subjective existence (of the Ego, and primarily of the Ego of the Other). Moreover, this gesture would comply with the logic of the break with phenomenology and ontology. The least one might say is that Levinas does not do so, and cannot do so, without renouncing philosophical discourse. And, if you

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138 writing and difference will, the attempt to achieve an opening toward the beyond of philosophical discourse, by means of philosophical discourse, which can never be shaken off completely, cannot possibly succeed within language—and Levinas recognizes that there is no thought before language and outside of it—except by formally and thematically posing the question of the relations between belonging and the opening, the question of closure. Formally—that is by posing it in the most effective and most formal, the most formalized, way possible: not in a logic, in other words in a philosophy, but in an inscribed description, in an inscription of the relations between the philosophical and the nonphilosophical, in a kind of unheard of graphics, within which philosophical conceptuality would be no more than a function. Let us add, in order to do him justice, that Kierkegaard had a sense of the relationship to the irreducibility of the totally-other, not in the egoistic and esthetic here and now, but in the religious beyond of the concept, in the direction of a certain Abraham. And did he not, in turn—for we must let the other speak—see in Ethics, as a moment of Category and Law, the forgetting, in anonymity, of the subjectivity of religion? From his point of view, the ethical moment is Hegelianism itself, and he says so explicitly. Which does not prevent him from reaffirming ethics in repetition, and from reproaching Hegel for not having constituted a morality. It is true that Ethics, in Levinas’s sense, is an Ethics without law and without concept, which maintains its nonviolent purity only before being determined as concepts and laws. This is not an objection: let us not forget that Levinas does not seek to propose laws or moral rules, does not seek to determine a morality, but rather the essence of the ethical relation in general. But as this determination does not offer itself as a theory of Ethics, in question then, is an Ethics of Ethics. In this case, it is perhaps serious that this Ethics of Ethics can occasion neither a determined ethics nor determined laws without negating and forgetting itself. Moreover, is this Ethics of Ethics beyond all laws? Is it not the Law of laws? A coherence which breaks down the coherence of the discourse against coherence—the infinite concept, hidden within the protest against the concept. If juxtaposition with Kierkegaard has often imposed itself upon us, despite the author’s own admonitions, we are certain that as concerns the essential in its initial inspiration Levinas’s protest against

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Hegelianism is foreign to Kierkegaard’s protest. Inversely, a confrontation of Levinas’s thought with Feuerbach’s anti-Hegelianism would necessarily uncover, it seems to us, more profound convergences and affinities that the meditation of the Trace would confirm further still. We are speaking here of convergences, and not of influences; primarily because the latter is a notion whose philosophical meaning is not clear to us; and next because, to our knowledge, Levinas nowhere alludes to Feuerbach or to Jaspers. But why does Levinas return to categories he seemed to have rejected previously in attempting this very difficult passage beyond the debate—which is also a complicity—between Hegelianism and classical anti-Hegelianism? We are not denouncing, here, an incoherence of language or a contradiction in the system. We are wondering about the meaning of a necessity: the necessity of lodging oneself within traditional conceptuality in order to destroy it. Why did this necessity finally impose itself upon Levinas? Is it an extrinsic necessity? Does it not touch upon only an instrument, only an “expression,” which can be put between quotation marks? Or does it hide, rather, some indestructible and unforeseeable resource of the Greek logos? Some unlimited power of envelopment, by which he who attempts to repel it would always already be overtaken? B. During the same period, Levinas had expelled the concept of exteriority. The latter referred to an enlightened unity of space which neutralized radical alterity: the relation to the other, the relation of Instants to each other, the relation to Death, etc.—all of which are not relations of an Inside to an Outside. “The relation with the other is a relation with a Mystery. It is the other’s exteriority, or rather his alterity, for exteriority is a property of space, and brings the subject back to himself through the light which constitutes his entire being” (TA). Now Totality and Infinity, subtitled Essay on Exteriority, does not only abundantly employ the notion of exteriority. Levinas also intends to show that true exteriority is not spatial, for space is the Site of the Same. Which means that the Site is always a site of the Same. Why is it necessary still to use the word “exteriority” (which, if it has a meaning, if it is not an algebraic X, obstinately beckons toward space and light) in order to signify a

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140 writing and difference nonspatial relationship? And if every “relationship” is spatial, why is it necessary still to designate as a (nonspatial) “relationship” the respect which absolves the other? Why is it necessary to obliterate this notion of exteriority without erasing it, without making it illegible, by stating that its truth is its untruth, that true exteriority is not spatial, that is, is not exteriority? That it is necessary to state infinity’s excess over totality in the language of totality; that it is necessary to state the other in the language of the Same; that it is necessary to think true exteriority as nonexteriority, that is, still by means of the Inside-Outside structure and by spatial metaphor; and that it is necessary still to inhabit the metaphor in ruins, to dress oneself in tradition’s shreds and the devil’s patches—all this means, perhaps, that there is no philosophical logos which must not first let itself be expatriated into the structure Inside-Outside. This deportation from its own site toward the Site, toward spatial locality is the metaphor congenital to the philosophical logos. Before being a rhetorical procedure within language, metaphor would be the emergence of language itself. And philosophy is only this language; in the best of cases, and in an unaccustomed sense of the expression, philosophy can only speak it, state the metaphor itself, which amounts to thinking the metaphor within the silent horizon of the nonmetaphor: Being. Space being the wound and finitude of birth (of the birth) without which one could not even open language, one would not even have a true or false exteriority to speak of. Therefore, one can, by using them, use up tradition’s words, rub them like a rusty and devalued old coin; one can say that true exteriority is nonexteriority without being interiority, and one can write by crossing out, by crossing out what already has been crossed out: for crossing out writes, still draws in space. The syntax of the Site whose archaic description is not legible on the metal of language cannot be erased: it is this metal itself, its too somber solidity and its too shining brilliance. Language, son of earth and sun: writing. One would attempt in vain, in order to wean language from exteriority and interiority, in order to wean language from weaning, to forget the words “inside,” “outside,” “exterior,” “interior,” etc., and to banish them by decree; for one would never come across a language without the rupture of space, an aerial or aquatic language in which, moreover, alterity would be lost more surely than ever. For the meanings which radiate from Inside-Outside, from Light-Night, etc., do not only

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inhabit the proscribed words; they are embedded, in person or vicariously, at the very heart of conceptuality itself. This is because they do not signify an immersion in space. The structure Inside-Outside or Day-Night has no meaning in a pure space given over to itself and disoriented. It emerges on the basis of an included origin, an inscribed eastern horizon which is neither within nor without space. This text of the glance is also the text of speech. Therefore it can be called Face. But one must not expect, henceforth, to separate language and space, to empty language of space, to snatch speech away from light, to speak while a Hand hides Glory. In vain would one exile any given word (“inside,” “outside,” “exterior,” “interior,” etc.), and in vain would one burn or emprison the letters of light, for language in its entirety already has awakened as a fall into light. That is, if you will, language arises with the sun. Even if “the sun is never named. . . its power is in our midst” (Saint-John Perse). To say that the infinite exteriority of the other is not spatial, is non-exteriority and non-interiority, to be unable to designate it otherwise than negatively—is this not to acknowledge that the infinite (also designated negatively in its current positivity: infinite) cannot be stated? Does this not amount to acknowledging that the structure “inside-outside,” which is language itself, marks the original finitude of speech and of whatever befalls it? No philosophical language will ever be able to reduce the naturality of a spatial praxis in language; and one would have to meditate the unity of Leibniz’s distinction between “civil language” and “scholarly” or philosophical language. And here one would have to meditate even more patiently the irreducible complicity, despite all of the philosopher’s rhetorical efforts, between everyday language and philosophical language; or, better, the complicity between certain historical languages and philosophical language. A certain ineradicable naturality, a certain original naïveté of philosophical language could be verified for each speculative concept (except, of course, for the nonconcepts which are the name of God and the verb to be). Philosophical language belongs to a system of language(s). Thereby, its nonspeculative ancestry always brings a certain equivocality into speculation. Since this equivocality is original and irreducible, perhaps philosophy must adopt it, think it and be thought in it, must accommodate duplicity and difference within speculation, within the very purity of philosophical meaning. No one,

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142 writing and difference it seems to us, has attempted this more profoundly than Hegel. Without naïvely using the category of chance, of happy predestination or of the chance encounter, one would have to do for each concept what Hegel does for the German notion of Aufhebung, whose equivocality and presence in the German language he calls delightful: “Aufheben has in the German language a double sense: that of preserving, maintaining, and that of leaving off, bringing to an end. To preserve, moreover, has a negative sense. . . . Lexicologically, these two determinations of the Aufheben may be considered as two meanings of the word. It is remarkable that a language comes to use one and the same word to express two opposed meanings. Speculative thought is delighted [my italics] to find in language words which by themselves have a speculative sense; the German language possesses several of these” (Wissenschaft der Logik I, pp. 124–25). In the Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Lectures on the Philosophy of History) Hegel also notes that the union of two meanings (historia rerum gestarum and res gestas) of the word Geschichte “in our language” is not a “simple exterior contingency.” Henceforth, if I cannot designate the (infinite) irreducible alterity of the Other except through the negation of (finite) spatial exteriority, perhaps the meaning of this alterity is finite, is not positively infinite. The infinitely other, the infinity of the other, is not the other as a positive infinity, as God, or as resemblance with God. The infinitely Other would not be what it is, other, if it was a positive infinity, and if it did not maintain within itself the negativity of the indefinite, of the apeiron. Does not “infinitely other” primarily signify that which does not come to an end, despite my interminable labor and experience? Can one respect the Other as Other, and expel negativity—labor—from transcendence, as Levinas seeks to do? The positive Infinity (God)—if these words are meaningful—cannot be infinitely Other. If one thinks, as Levinas does, that positive Infinity tolerates, or even requires, infinite alterity, then one must renounce all language, and first of all the words infinite and other. Infinity cannot be understood as Other except in the form of the in-finite. As soon as one attempts to think Infinity as a positive plenitude (one pole of Levinas’s nonnegative transcendence), the other becomes unthinkable, impossible, unutterable. Perhaps Levinas calls us toward this unthinkable-impossible-unutterable beyond (tradition’s) Being and Logos. But it must not be possible

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either to think or state this call. In any event, that the positive plenitude of classical infinity is translated into language only by betraying itself in a negative word (in-finite), perhaps situates, in the most profound way, the point where thought breaks with language. A break which afterward will but resonate throughout all language. This is why the modern philosophies which no longer seek to distinguish between thought and language, nor to place them in a hierarchy, are essentially philosophies of original finitude. But then they should be able to abandon the word “finitude,” forever prisoner of the classical framework. Is this possible? And what does it mean to abandon a classical notion? The other cannot be what it is, infinitely other, except in finitude and mortality (mine and its). It is such as soon as it comes into language, of course, and only then, and only if the word other has a meaning—but has not Levinas taught us that there is no thought before language? This is why our questions certainly would be less bothersome for a classical infinitism of the Cartesian type, for example, which would dissociate thought and language, the latter never going as fast or as far as the former. Not only would these questions be less bothersome for a classical infinitism, but they could be its own questions. In another way: to neutralize space within the description of the other, in order thereby to liberate positive infinity—is this not to neutralize the essential finitude of a face (glance-speech) which is a body, and not, as Levinas continually insists, the corporeal metaphor of etherealized thought? Body: that is, also exteriority, locality in the fully spatial, literally spatial, meaning of the word; a zero point, the origin of space, certainly, but an origin which has no meaning before the of, an origin inseparable from genitivity and from the space that it engenders and orients: an inscribed origin. The inscription is the written origin: traced and henceforth inscribed in a system, in a figure which it no longer governs. Without which there no longer would be a body proper to oneself. If the face of the other was not also, irreducibly, spatial exteriority, we would still have to distinguish between soul and body, thought and speech; or better, between a true, nonspatial face, and its mask or metaphor, its spatial figure. The entire Metaphysics of the Face would collapse. Again, this question could be derived as much from a classical infinitism (duality of thought and language, but also of thought and body) as from the most modern philosophy of finitude. This strange alliance in the

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144 writing and difference question perhaps signifies that within philosophy and within language, within philosophical discourse (supposing there are any others), one cannot simultaneously save the themes of positive infinity and of the face (the nonmetaphorical unity of body, glance, speech, and thought). This last unity, it seems to us, can be thought only within the horizon of infinite (indefinite) alterity as the irreducibly common horizon of Death and the Other. The horizon of finitude or the finitude of the horizon. But, let us repeat, all this within philosophical discourse, where the thought of Death itself (without metaphor) and the thought of a positive Infinity have never been able to understand each other. If the face is body, it is mortal. Infinite alterity as death cannot be reconciled with infinite alterity as positivity and presence (God). Metaphysical transcendence cannot be at once transcendence toward the other as Death and transcendence towards the other as God. Unless God means Death, which after all has never been excluded by the entirety of the classical philosophy within which we understand God both as Life and as the Truth of Infinity, of positive Presence. But what does this exclusion mean if not the exclusion of every particular determination? And that God is nothing (determined), is not life, because he is everything? and therefore is at once All and Nothing, Life and Death. Which means that God is or appears, is named, within the difference between All and Nothing, Life and Death. Within difference, and at bottom as Difference itself. This difference is what is called History. God is inscribed in it. It will be said that Levinas stands opposed to precisely this kind of philosophical discourse. But in this combat, he already has given up the best weapon: disdain of discourse. In effect, when confronted by the classical difficulties of language we are referring to, Levinas cannot provide himself with the classical resources against them. At arms with the problems which were equally the problems of negative theology and of Bergsonism, he does not give himself the right to speak, as they did, in a language resigned to its own failure. Negative theology was spoken in a speech that knew itself failed and finite, inferior to logos as God’s understanding. Above all, negative theology never undertook a Discourse with God in the face to face, and breath to breath, of two free speeches; and this despite the humility and the haughtiness of breaking off, or undertaking, the exchange. Analogously, Bergson had the right to announce the intuition of duration, and to denounce intellectual

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spatialization, within a language given over to space. It was not a question of saving, but of destroying discourse within “metaphysics,” the science which allegedly does without symbols” (Bergson). Antagonistic metaphors were multiplied systematically in this autodestruction of language which advocated silent metaphysical intuition. Language being defined as a historical residue, there was no contradiction in utilizing it, for better or for worse, in order to denounce its own betrayal, and then to abandon it to its own insufficiency as rhetorical refuse, speech lost to metaphysics. Like negative theology, a philosophy of intuitive communion gave itself the right (correctly or incorrectly, another problem) to travel through philosophical discourse as through a foreign medium. But what happens when this right is no longer given, when the possibility of metaphysics is the possibility of speech? When metaphysical responsibility is responsibility for language, because “thought consists of speaking” (TI), and metaphysics is a language with God? How to think the other, if the other can be spoken only as exteriority and through exteriority, that is, nonalterity? And if the speech which must inaugurate and maintain absolute separation is by its essence rooted in space, which cannot conceive separation and absolute alterity? If, as Levinas says, only discourse (and not intuitive contact) is righteous, and if, moreover, all discourse essentially retains within it space and the Same—does this not mean that discourse is originally violent? And that the philosophical logos, the only one in which peace may be declared, is inhabited by war? The distinction between discourse and violence42 always will be an inaccessible horizon. Nonviolence would be the telos, and not the essence of discourse. Perhaps it will be said that something like discourse has its essence in its telos, and the presence of its present in its future. This certainly is so, but on the condition that its future and its telos be nondiscourse: peace as a certain silence, a certain beyond of speech, a certain possibility, a certain silent horizon of speech. And telos has always had the form of presence, be it a future presence. There is war only after the opening of discourse, and war dies out only at the end of discourse. Peace, like silence, is the strange vocation of a language called outside itself by itself. But since finite silence is also the medium of violence, language can only indefinitely tend toward justice by acknowledging and practicing the violence within it. Violence against violence. Economy of

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146 writing and difference violence. An economy irreducible to what Levinas envisions in the word. If light is the element of violence, one must combat light with a certain other light, in order to avoid the worst violence, the violence of the night which precedes or represses discourse. This vigilance is a violence chosen as the least violence by a philosophy which takes history, that is, finitude, seriously; a philosophy aware of itself as historical in each of its aspects (in a sense which tolerates neither finite totality, nor positive infinity), and aware of itself, as Levinas says in another sense, as economy. But again, an economy which in being history, can be at home neither in the finite totality which Levinas calls the Same nor in the positive presence of the Infinite. Speech is doubtless the first defeat of violence, but paradoxically, violence did not exist before the possibility of speech. The philosopher (man) must speak and write within this war of light, a war in which he always already knows himself to be engaged; a war which he knows is inescapable, except by denying discourse, that is, by risking the worst violence. This is why this avowal of the war within discourse, an avowal which is not yet peace, signifies the opposite of bellicosity; the bellicosity—and who has shown this better than Hegel?—whose best accomplice within history is irenics. Within history which the philosopher cannot escape, because it is not history in the sense given to it by Levinas (totality), but is the history of the departures from totality, history as the very movement of transcendence, of the excess over the totality without which no totality would appear as such. History is not the totality transcended by eschatology, metaphysics, or speech. It is transcendence itself. If speech is a movement of metaphysical transcendence, it is history, and not beyond history. It is difficult to think the origin of history in a perfectly finite totality (the Same), as well as, moreover, in a perfectly positive infinity. If, in this sense, the movement of metaphysical transcendence is history, it is still violent, for—and this is the legitimate truism from which Levinas always draws inspiration—history is violence. Metaphysics is economy: violence against violence, light against light: philosophy (in general). About which it can be said, by transposing Claudel’s intention, that everything in it “is painted on light as if with condensed light, like the air which becomes frost.” This becoming is war. This polemic is language itself. Its inscription.

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Of transcendental violence In addition, metaphysics, unable to escape its ancestry in light, always supposes a phenomenology in its very critique of phenomenology, and especially if, like Levinas’s metaphysics, it seeks to be discourse and instruction. A. Does metaphysics suppose this phenomenology only as a method, as a technique, in the strict sense of these words? Although he rejects the majority of the literal results of Husserl’s researches, Levinas keeps to the methodological inheritance: “The presentation and development of the notions employed owes everything to the phenomenological method” (TI; DL). But are not the presentation and development of ideas but the vestments of thought? And can a method be borrowed, like a tool? Thirty years earlier, in the wake of Heidegger, did not Levinas maintain that method cannot be isolated? For method always shelters, especially in Husserl’s case, “an anticipated view of the ‘sense’ of the being which one encounters” (THI). Levinas wrote at this time: “Consequently, in our exposition we cannot separate the theory of intuition, as a philosophical method, from what might be called Husserl’s ontology” (THI). Now, what the phenomenological method refers to, explicitly and in the last analysis (and this would be too easy to show), is Western philosophy’s very decision, since Plato, to consider itself as science, as theory: that is, precisely as that which Levinas wishes to put into question by the ways and means of phenomenology. B. Beyond its method, the aspect of “Husserl’s essential teaching” (TI) which Levinas intends to retain is not only its supple and necessary descriptions, the fidelity to the meaning of experience, but also the concept of intentionality. An intentionality enlarged beyond its representative and theoretical dimension, beyond the noetico-noematical structure which Husserl incorrectly would have seen as the primordial structure. Repression of the infinite would have kept Husserl from access to the true depths of intentionality as desire and as metaphysical transcendence toward the other beyond phenomenality or Being. This repression would occur in two ways.

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148 writing and difference On the one hand, in the value of adequation. As vision and theoretical intuition, Husserlian intentionality would be adequation. This latter would exhaust and interiorize all distance and all true alterity. “Vision, in effect, is essentially an adequation of exteriority to interiority: exteriority is reabsorbed in the contemplating soul, and, as an adequate idea, is revealed a priori, resulting in a Sinngebung” (TI). Now, “intentionality, in which thought remains adequation to its object, does not define . . . consciousness at its fundamental level.” Certainly Husserl is not named here, at the very moment when Levinas speaks of intentionality as adequation; one may always suppose that by the expression “intentionality, in which thought remains adequation,” Levinas means “an intentionality such that, etc., an intentionality in which at least, etc.” But the context, numerous other passages and the allusion to the Sinngebung, all clearly indicate that Husserl, in the letter of his texts, was unable to recognize that “as intentionality all knowledge already supposes the idea of infinity, which is adequation par excellence” (TI). Thus, supposing that Husserl had foreseen the infinite horizons which overflow objectivity and adequate intuition, he would have interpreted them, literally, as “thoughts aiming at objects”: “What does it matter if in Husserlian phenomenology, understood literally, these unsuspected horizons are interpreted, in turn, as thoughts aiming at objects!” (cited above). On the other hand, supposing that the Husserlian Cogito opened onto the infinite, according to Levinas, it would open onto an objectinfinity, an infinity without alterity, a false infinity: “If Husserl sees in the cogito a subjectivity with no support outside itself, he is constituting the idea of infinity itself, giving it to himself as an object.” The “false-infinity,” a Hegelian expression which Levinas never uses, nevertheless seems to us, perhaps because it is Hegelian, to haunt numerous gestures of denunciation in Totality and Infinity. As it was for Hegel, the “false-infinity” for Levinas would be the indefinite, negative form of infinity. But, since Levinas conceives true alterity as nonnegativity (nonnegative transcendence), he can make the other the true infinity, and make the same (in strange complicity with negativity) the false-infinity. Which would have seemed absolutely mad to Hegel (and to all the metaphysics expanded and rethought in him): how can alterity be separated from negativity, how can alterity be separated from the

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“false infinity”? Or inversely, how could absolute sameness not be infinity? If, as Levinas says, the same is a violent totality, this would mean that it is a finite totality, and therefore is abstract, more other than the other (than an other totality), etc. The same as finite totality would not be the same, but still the other. Levinas would be speaking of the other under the rubric of the same, and of the same under the rubric of the other, etc. If the finite totality was the same, it could not be thought, or posed as such, without becoming other than itself (and this is war). If it did not do so, it could not enter into war with others (finite totalities), nor could it be violent. Henceforth, not being violent, it would not be the same in Levinas’s sense (finite totality). Entering into war—and war there is—it is conceived, certainly, as the other’s other, that is, it gains access to the other as an other (self). But again, it is no longer a totality in Levinas’s sense. In this language, which is the only language of Western philosophy, can one not repeat Hegelianism, which is only this language coming into absolute possession of itself? Under these conditions, the only effective position to take in order not to be enveloped by Hegel would seem to be, for an instant, the following: to consider the false-infinity (that is, in a profound way, original finitude) irreducible. Perhaps this is what Husserl does, at bottom, by demonstrating the irreducibility of intentional incompleteness, and therefore of alterity; and by showing that since consciousness is irreducible, it can never possibly, by its own essence, become self-consciousness, nor be reassembled absolutely close to itself in the parousia of an absolute knowledge. But can this be said, can one think the “false infinity” as such (time, in a word), can one pause alongside it as alongside the truth of experience, without already (an already which permits us to think time!) having let the true infinity, which then must be recognized as such, be indicated, presented, thought and stated? What we call philosophy, which perhaps is not the entirety of thought, cannot think the false, nor even choose the false, without paying homage to the anteriority and the superiority of the true (same relationship between the other and the same). This last question, which indeed could be Levinas’s question to Husserl, would demonstrate that as soon as he speaks against Hegel, Levinas can only confirm Hegel, has confirmed him already. But is there a more rigorously and, especially, a more literally

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150 writing and difference Husserlian theme than the theme of inadequation? Of the infinite overflowing of horizons? Who was more obstinately determined than Husserl to show that vision was originally and essentially the inadequation of interiority and exteriority? And that the perception of the transcendent and extended thing was essentially and forever incomplete? That immanent perception occurred within the infinite horizon of the flux of experience? (cf., for example, Ideas I, paragraph 83, passim). And above all, who better than Levinas first gave us to understand these Husserlian themes? Therefore, it is not a question of recalling their existence, but of asking whether Husserl finally summarized inadequation, and reduced the infinite horizons of experience to the condition of available objects. And whether he did so by the secondary interpretation of which Levinas accuses him. We can hardly believe so. In the two intentional directions of which we have just spoken, the Idea in the Kantian sense designates the infinite overflowing of a horizon which, by reason of an absolute and essential necessity which itself is absolutely principled and irreducible, never can become an object itself, or be completed, equaled, by the intuition of an object. Even by God’s intuition. The horizon itself cannot become an object because it is the unobjectifiable wellspring of every object in general. This impossibility of adequation is so radical that neither the originality nor the apodicticity of evident truths are necessarily adequations. (Cf., for example, Ideas I, sec. 3; Cartesian Meditations, sec. 9, passim.) (Of course, this does not imply that certain possibilities of adequate evident truths—particular and founded ones—are overlooked by Husserl.) The importance of the concept of horizon lies precisely in its inability to make any constitutive act into an object, and in that it opens the work of objectification to infinity. In phenomenology there is never a constitution of horizons, but horizons of constitution. That the infinity of the Husserlian horizon has the form of an indefinite opening, and that it offers itself without any possible end to the negativity of constitution (of the work of objectification) does this not certainly keep it from all totalization, from the illusion of the immediate presence of a plenitudinous infinity in which the other suddenly becomes unfindable? If a consciousness of infinite inadequation to the infinite (and even to the finite) distinguishes a body of thought careful to respect exteriority, it is difficult to see how Levinas can depart from

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Husserl, on this point at least. Is not intentionality respect itself? The eternal irreducibility of the other to the same, but of the other appearing as other for the same? For without the phenomenon of other as other no respect would be possible. The phenomenon of respect supposes the respect of phenomenality. And ethics, phenomenology. In this sense, phenomenology is respect itself, the development and becoming-language of respect itself. This was Husserl’s aim in stating that reason does not tolerate being distinguished into theoretical, practical, etc. (cf. above). This does not mean that respect as ethics is derived from phenomenology, that it supposes phenomenology as its premise, or as a previous or superior value. The presupposition of phenomenology is of a unique kind. It “commands” nothing, in the worldly (real, political, etc.) sense of commandment. It is the very neutralization of this kind of commandment. But it does not neutralize the worldly type of commandment in order to substitute another type of commandment for it. It is profoundly foreign to all hierarchies. Which is to say that ethics not only is neither dissipated in phenomenology nor submitted to it, but that ethics finds within phenomenology its own meaning, its freedom and radicality. Moreover, it seems incontestable to us that the themes of nonpresence (temporalization and alterity) contradict that which makes phenomenology a metaphysics of presence, working it ceaselessly, and we emphasize this elsewhere. C. Can Levinas separate himself from Husserl more legitimately as concerns theoretism and the primacy of the consciousness of the object? Let us not forget that the “primacy” necessarily in question here is that of the object or of objectivity in general. Now phenomenology has surely contributed nothing if not an infinite renewal, enlargement, and suppling of the notion of object in general. The ultimate jurisdiction of evident truths is infinitely open, is open for every type of possible object, that is, for every conceivable sense present for consciousness in general. No discourse (for example, the discourse in Totality and Infinity which seeks to reawaken ethical truths to their absolute independence, etc.) could be meaningful, could be thought or understood, if it did not draw upon this layer of phenomenological evidence in general. It suffices that ethical meaning be thought in order for Husserl to be right. Not only nominal definitions

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152 writing and difference but, before them, possibilities of essence which guide all concepts, are presupposed when one speaks of ethics, of transcendence, of infinity, etc. These expressions must have a meaning for concrete consciousness in general, or no discourse and no thought would be possible. This domain of absolutely “prior” truths is the domain of the transcendental phenomenology in which a phenomenology of ethics must take root. This rooting is not real, does not signify a real dependence; it would be vain to reproach transcendental phenomenology for being in fact incapable of engendering ethical values or behaviors (or, amounting to the same thing for being able to repress them, more or less directly). Since every determined meaning, every thought meaning, every noema (for example, the meaning of ethics) supposes the possibility of noema in general, it is fitting to begin rightfully with transcendental phenomenology. To begin rightfully with the general possibility of a noema which—let us recall this decisive point—is not a real (reell) moment for Husserl, and therefore is without any real (hierarchical or other) relationship to anything else: anything else being capable of conception only in noematicity. In particular, this means that from Husserl’s point of view ethics in fact, in existence and in history, could not be subordinated to transcendental neutralization, nor be submitted to it in any way. Neither ethics, nor anything else in the world, moreover. Transcendental neutralization is in principle, by its meaning, foreign to all factuality, all existence in general. In fact it is neither before nor after ethics. Neither before nor after anything that is. Thus, one may speak of ethical objectivity, or of ethical values or imperatives as objects (noemas) with all their originality, without reducing this objectivity to any of those which incorrectly (but the fault is not Husserl’s) function as the model for what commonly is understood as objectivity (theoretical objectivity, political, technical, natural, etc. objectivity). Truthfully, there are two meanings of the theoretical: the current meaning, the one Levinas’s protest particularly aims at; and the more hidden sense in which appearance in general is maintained, including the appearance of the nontheoretical (in the first sense) in particular. In this second sense, phenomenology is indeed a theoretism, but it is so in the extent to which all thought and all language are tied to theoretism, de facto and de jure. Phenomenology measures this extent. I know the meaning of the nontheoretical as

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such (for example, ethics or the metaphysical in Levinas’s sense), with a theoretical knowledge (in general), and I respect it as such, as what it is, in its meaning. I have regard43 for recognizing that which cannot be regarded as a thing, as a façade, as a theorem. I have regard for the face itself. D. But, as we know, the fundamental disagreement between Levinas and Husserl is not here. Nor does it bear upon the ahistoricity of meaning with which Levinas formerly reproached Husserl, and concerning which the latter had “held in store surprises” (as Levinas’s eschatology was to surprise us thirty years later in speaking “from beyond the totality or history” TI). Which supposes, once more, that the totality is finite (a supposition in no way inscribed in its concept), that history as such can be a finite totality, and that there is no history beyond the finite totality. Perhaps one would have to show, as was suggested above, that history is impossible, meaningless, in the finite totality, and that it is impossible, meaningless, in the positive and actual infinity; that history keeps to the difference between totality and infinity, and that history precisely is that which Levinas calls transcendence and eschatology. A system is neither finite nor infinite. A structural totality escapes this alternative in its functioning. It escapes the archaeological and the eschatological, and inscribes them in itself. The disagreement appears definite as concerns the Other. As we have seen: according to Levinas, by making the other, notably in the Cartesian Meditations, the ego’s phenomenon, constituted by analogical appresentation on the basis of belonging to the ego’s own sphere, Husserl allegedly missed the infinite alterity of the other, reducing it to the same. To make the other an alter ego, Levinas says frequently, is to neutralize its absolute alterity. (a) Now, it would be easy to show the degree to which Husserl takes pains to respect, in its meaning, the alterity of the Other, particularly in the Cartesian Meditations. He is concerned with describing how the other as other, in its irreducible alterity, is presented to me. Is presented to me, as we will see later, as originary nonpresence. It is the other as other which is the ego’s phenomenon: the phenomenon of a certain non-phenomenality which is irreducible for the ego as ego in general (the eidos ego). For it is impossible to encounter the alter ego (in the

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154 writing and difference very form of the encounter44 described by Levinas), impossible to respect it in experience and in language, if this other, in its alterity, does not appear for an ego (in general). One could neither speak, nor have any sense of the totally other, if there was not a phenomenon of the totally other, or evidence of the totally other as such. No one more than Husserl has been sensitive to the singular and irreducible style of this evidence, and to the original non-phenomenalization indicated within it. Even if one neither seeks nor is able to thematize the other of which one does not speak, but to whom one speaks, this impossibility and this imperative themselves can be thematized (as Levinas does) only on the basis of a certain appearance of the other as other for an ego. Husserl speaks of this system, of this appearance, and of the impossibility of thematizing the other in person. This is his problem: “They, (the other egos) however, are not simple representations or objects represented within me, synthetic unities of a process of verification taking place ‘within me,’ but precisely ‘others’ . . . ‘subjects for this same world . . . subjects who perceive the world . . . and who thereby experience me, just as I experience the world and in it, ‘others’ ” (Cartesian Meditations). It is this appearance of the other as that which I can never be, this originary nonphenomenality, which is examined as the ego’s intentional phenomenon. (b) For—and here we are keeping to the most manifest and most massively incontestable meaning of the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations whose course is so mazelike—Husserl’s most central affirmation concerns the irreducibly mediate nature of the intentionality aiming at the other as other. It is evident, by an essential, absolute and definitive selfevidence that the other as transcendental other (other absolute origin and other zero point in the orientation of the world), can never be given to me in an original way and in person, but only through analogical appresentation. The necessary reference to analogical appresentation, far from signifying an analogical and assimilatory reduction of the other to the same, confirms and respects separation, the unsurpassable necessity of (nonobjective) mediation. If I did not approach the other by way of analogical appresentation, if I attained to the other immediately and originally, silently, in communion with the other’s own experience, the other would cease to be the other. Contrary to appearances, the theme of appresentative transposition

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translates the recognition of the radical separation of the absolute origins, the relationship of absolved absolutes and nonviolent respect for the secret: the opposite of victorious assimilation. Bodies, transcendent and natural things, are others in general for my consciousness. They are outside, and their transcendence is the sign of an already irreducible alterity. Levinas does not think so; Husserl does, and thinks that “other” already means something when things are in question. Which is to take seriously the reality of the external world. Another sign of this alterity in general, which things share here with others, is that something within them too is always hidden, and is indicated only by anticipation, analogy and appresentation. Husserl states this in the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations: analogical appresentation belongs, to a certain extent, to every perception. But in the case of the other as transcendent thing, the principled possibility of an originary and original presentation of the hidden visage is always open, in principle and a priori. This possibility is absolutely rejected in the case of Others. The alterity of the transcendent thing, although already irreducible, is such only by means of the indefinite incompleteness of my original perceptions. Thus it is incomparable to the alterity of Others, which is also irreducible, and adds to the dimension of incompleteness (the body of the Other in space, the history of our relations, etc.) a more profound dimension of nonoriginality—the radical impossibility of going around to see things from the other side. But without the first alterity, the alterity of bodies (and the Other is also a body, from the beginning), the second alterity could never emerge. The system of these two alterities, the one inscribed in the other, must be thought together: the alterity of Others, therefore, by a double power of indefiniteness. The stranger is infinitely other because by his essence no enrichment of his profile can give me the subjective face of his experience from his perspective, such as he has lived it. Never will this experience be given to me originally, like everything which is mir eigenes, which is proper to me. This transcendence of the nonproper no longer is that of the entirety, always inaccessible on the basis of always partial attempts: transcendence of Infinity, not of Totality. Levinas and Husserl are quite close here. But by acknowledging in this infinitely other as such (appearing as such) the status of an intentional modification of the ego in general, Husserl gives himself the right

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156 writing and difference to speak of the infinitely other as such, accounting for the origin and the legitimacy of his language. He describes the phenomenal system of nonphenomenality. Levinas in fact speaks of the infinitely other, but by refusing to acknowledge an intentional modification of the ego— which would be a violent and totalitarian act for him—he deprives himself of the very foundation and possibility of his own language. What authorizes him to say “infinitely other” if the infinitely other does not appear as such in the zone he calls the same, and which is the neutral level of transcendental description? To return, as to the only possible point of departure, to the intentional phenomenon in which the other appears as other, and lends itself to language, to every possible language, is perhaps to give oneself over to violence, or to make oneself its accomplice at least, and to acquiesce—in the critical sense—to the violence of the fact; but in question, then, is an irreducible zone of factuality, an original, transcendental violence, previous to every ethical choice, even supposed by ethical nonviolence. Is it meaningful to speak of a preethical violence? If the transcendental “violence” to which we allude is tied to phenomenality itself, and to the possibility of language, it then would be embedded in the root of meaning and logos, before the latter had to be determined as rhetoric, psychagogy, demagogy, etc. (c) Levinas writes: “The other, as other, is not only an alter ego. It is what I myself am not” (EE and TA). “Decency” and “everyday life” incorrectly lead us to believe that “the other is known through sympathy, as an other like myself, as alter ego” (TA). This is exactly what Husserl does not do. He seeks to recognize the other as Other only in its form as ego, in its form of alterity, which cannot be that of things in the world. If the other were not recognized as a transcendental alter ego, it would be entirely in the world and not, as ego, the origin of the world. To refuse to see in it an ego in this sense is, within the ethical order, the very gesture of all violence. If the other was not recognized as ego, its entire alterity would collapse. Therefore, it seems that one may not suppose that Husserl makes of the other an other like myself (in the factual sense of the word), or a real modification of my life, without misconstruing his most permanent and openly stated intentions. If the Other was a real moment of my egological life, if “inclusion of an other monad within my own” (Cartesian Meditations) was real, I would perceive it originaliter. Husserl does not cease to emphasize that

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this is an absolute impossibility. The other as alter ego signifies the other as other, irreducible to my ego, precisely because it is an ego, because it has the form of the ego. The egoity of the other permits him to say “ego” as I do; and this is why he is Other, and not a stone, or a being without speech in my real economy. This is why, if you will, he is face, can speak to me, understand me, and eventually command me. Dissymmetry itself would be impossible without this symmetry, which is not of the world, and which, having no real aspect, imposes no limit upon alterity and dissymmetry—makes them possible, on the contrary. This dissymmetry is an economy in a new sense; a sense which would probably be intolerable to Levinas. Despite the logical absurdity of this formulation, this economy is the transcendental symmetry of two empirical asymmetries. The other, for me, is an ego which I know to be in relation to me as to an other. Where have these movements been better described than in The Phenomenology of the Mind? The movement of transcendence toward the other, as invoked by Levinas, would have no meaning if it did not bear within it, as one of its essential meanings, that in my ipseity I know myself to be other for the other. Without this, “I” (in general: egoity), unable to be the other’s other, would never be the victim of violence. The violence of which Levinas speaks would be a violence without victim. But since, in the dissymmetry which he describes, the author of violence could never be the other himself, but always the same (ego), and since all egos are others for others, the violence without victim would be also a violence without author. And all these propositions can be reversed without difficulty. It will be easily understood that if the Parmenides of the Poem gives us to believe, through interposed historical phantasms, that he lent himself to parricide several times, the great and fearful white shadow which spoke to the young Socrates continues to smile when we undertake grand discourses on separate beings, unity, difference, the same and the other. To what exercises would Parmenides give himself over, at the frontiers of Totality and Infinity, if we attempted to make him understand that ego equals same, and that the other is what it is only as the absolute infinitely other absolved of its relationship to the Same. For example: (1) The infinitely other, he would say perhaps, can be what it is only if it is other, that is, other than. Other than must be other than myself. Henceforth, it is no longer absolved of a relation to an ego.

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158 writing and difference Therefore, it is no longer infinitely, absolutely other. It is no longer what it is. If it was absolved, it would not be the other either, but the Same. (2) The infinitely other cannot be what it is—infinitely other— except by being absolutely not the same. That is, in particular, by being other than itself (non ego). Being other than itself, it is not what it is. Therefore, it is not infinitely other, etc. At bottom, we believe, this exercise is not just verbiage, or dialectical virtuosity in the “play of the Same.” It would mean that the expression “infinitely other” or “absolutely other” cannot be stated and thought simultaneously; that the other cannot be absolutely exterior45 to the same without ceasing to be other; and that, consequently, the same is not a totality closed in upon itself, an identity playing with itself, having only the appearance of alterity, in what Levinas calls economy, work, and history. How could there be a “play of the Same” if alterity itself was not already in the Same, with a meaning of inclusion doubtless betrayed by the word in? Without alterity in the same, how could the “play of the Same” occur, in the sense of playful activity, or of dislocation, in a machine or organic totality which plays or works? And it could be shown that for Levinas work, always enclosed inside totality and history, fundamentally remains a game. A proposition that we can accept, with several precautions, more easily than he. Finally, let us confess our total deafness to propositions of this type: “Being occurs as multiple, and as divided into Same and Other. This is its ultimate structure” (TI). What is the division of being between the same and the other? Is it a division between the same and the other, which does not suppose, at very least, that the same is the other’s other, and the other the same as oneself? We are not only thinking of Parmenides’ exercise, playing with the young Socrates. The Stranger in the Sophist who, like Levinas, seems to break with Eleatism in the name of alterity, knows that alterity can be thought only as negativity, and above all, can be said only as negativity, which Levinas begins by refusing; he knows too, that differing from Being, the other is always relative, is stated pros eteron, which does not prevent it from being an eidos (or a genre, in a nonconceptual sense), that is, from being the same as itself (“same as itself ” already supposing, as Heidegger notes in Identity and Difference, precisely as concerns the Sophist, mediation, relation, and difference: eksastan auto tauton). Levinas, from his perspective, would refuse to

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assimilate the Other to the eteron in question here. But how can the “Other” be thought or said without reference—we do not say reduction—to the alterity of the eteron in general? This last notion, henceforth, no longer has the restricted meaning which permits its simple opposition to the notion of Other, as if it was confined to the region of real or logical objectivity. The eteron, here, belongs to a more profound and original zone than that in which this philosophy of subjectivity (that is, of objectivity), still implicated in the notion of the Other, is expanded. The other, then, would not be what he is (my fellow man as foreigner) if he were not alter ego. This is a self-evidence greatly prior to “decency” and to the dissimulations of “daily life.” Does not Levinas treat the expression alter ego as if alter were the epithet of a real subject (on a pre-eidetic level)? As an ephithetical, accidental modification of my real (empirical) identity? Now, the transcendental syntax of the expression alter ego tolerates no relationship of substantive to adjective, of absolute to epithet, in one sense or the other. This is its strangeness. A necessity due to the finitude of meaning: the other is absolutely other only if he is an ego, that is, in a certain way, if he is the same as I. Inversely, the other as res is simultaneously less other (not absolutely other) and less “the same” than I. Simultaneously more and less other, which means, once more, that the absolute of alterity is the same. And this contradiction (in terms of a formal logic which Levinas follows for once, since he refuses to call the other alter ego), this impossibility of translating my relation to the Other into the rational coherence of language—this contradiction and this impossibility are not the signs of “irrationality”: they are the sign, rather, that one may no longer draw inspiration from within the coherence of the Logos, but that thought is stifled in the region of the origin of language as dialogue and difference. This origin, as the concrete condition of rationality, is nothing less than “irrational,” but it could not be “included” in language. This origin is an inscribed inscription. Further, every reduction of the other to a real moment of my life, its reduction to the state of empirical alter-ego, is an empirical possibility, or rather eventuality, which is called violence; and violence presupposes the necessary eidetic relationships envisaged in Husserl’s descriptions. For, on the contrary, to gain access to the egoity of the alter ego

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160 writing and difference as if to its alterity itself is the most peaceful gesture possible. We do not say absolutely peaceful. We say economical. There is a transcendental and preethical violence, a (general) dissymmetry whose archia is the same, and which eventually permits the inverse dissymmetry, that is, the ethical nonviolence of which Levinas speaks. In effect, either there is only the same, which can no longer even appear and be said, nor even exercise violence (pure infinity or finitude); or indeed there is the same and the other, and then the other cannot be the other—of the same— except by being the same (as itself: ego), and the same cannot be the same (as itself: ego) except by being the other’s other: alter ego. That I am also essentially the other’s other, and that I know I am, is the evidence of a strange symmetry whose trace appears nowhere in Levinas’s descriptions. Without this evidence, I could not desire (or) respect the other in ethical dissymmetry. This transcendental violence, which does not spring from an ethical resolution or freedom, or from a certain way of encountering or exceeding the other, originally institutes the relationship between two finite ipseities. In effect, the necessity of gaining access to the meaning of the other (in its irreducible alterity) on the basis of its “face,” that is, its nonphenomenal phenomenon, its nonthematic theme, in other words, on the basis of an intentional modification of my ego (in general), (an intentional modification upon which Levinas indeed must base the meaning of his discourse); and the necessity of speaking of the other as other, or to the other as other, on the basis of its appearing-for-me-as-what-it-is: the other (an appearing which dissimulates its essential dissimulation, takes it out of the light, stripping it, and hiding that which is hidden in the other), as the necessity from which no discourse can escape, from its earliest origin—these necessities are violence itself, or rather the transcendental origin of an irreducible violence, supposing, as we said above, that it is somehow meaningful to speak of preethical violence. For this transcendental origin, as the irreducible violence of the relation to the other, is at the same time nonviolence, since it opens the relation to the other. It is an economy. And it is this economy which, by this opening, will permit access to the other to be determined, in ethical freedom, as moral violence or nonviolence. It is difficult to see how the notion of violence (for example, as the dissimulation or oppression of the other by the same, a notion which Levinas employs as self-evident, and

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which, however, already signifies alteration of the same, of the other as what it is) could be determined rigorously on a purely ethical level, without prior eidetic-transcendental analysis of the relations between ego and alter-ego in general, betweeen several origins of the world in general. That the other appears as such only in its relationship to the same, is a self-evidence that the Greeks had no need to acknowledge in the transcendental egology which would confirm it later; and, it is violence as the origin of meaning and of discourse in the reign of finitude.46 The difference between the same and the other, which is not a difference or a relation among others, has no meaning in the infinite, except to speak, as Hegel does and against Levinas, of the anxiety of the infinite which determines and negates itself. Violence, certainly, appears within the horizon of an idea of the infinite. But this horizon is not the horizon of the infinitely other, but of a reign in which the difference between the same and the other, différance, would no longer be valid, that is, of a reign in which peace itself would no longer have meaning. And first of all because there would be no more phenomenality or meaning in general. The infinitely other and the infinitely same, if these words have meaning for a finite being, is the same. Hegel himself recognized negativity, anxiety or war in the infinite absolute only as the movement of the absolute’s own history, whose horizon is a final pacification in which alterity would be absolutely encapsulated, if not lifted up, in parousia.47 How are we to interpret the necessity of thinking the fact of what is first of all on the horizon in what is generally called the end of history? Which amounts to asking what the thought of the other as other means, and whether or not the light of the “as such” is dissimulation in this unique case. Unique case? No, we must reverse the terms: “other” is the name, “other” is the meaning of this unthinkable unity of light and night. What “other” means is phenomenality as disappearance. Is it a question, here, of a “third route excluded by these contradictory ones” (revelation and dissimulation, The Trace of the Other)? But this route cannot appear, cannot be stated as tertiary. If it is called “trace,” the word can emerge only as a metaphor whose philosophical elucidation will ceaselessly call upon “contradictions.” Without which its originality—that which distinguishes it from the Sign (the word conventionally chosen by Levinas)—would not appear. For it must be made to appear. And the phenomenon supposes original contamination by the sign.

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162 writing and difference War, therefore, is congenital to phenomenality, is the very emergence of speech and of appearing. Hegel does not abstain by chance from pronouncing the word “man” in the Phenomenology of the Mind; and he describes war (for example, the dialectic of the Master and the Slave) without anthropological reference, within the realm of a science of consciousness, that is, of phenomenality itself, in the necessary structure of its movement: a science of experience and of consciousness. Discourse, therefore, if it is originally violent, can only do itself violence, can only negate itself in order to affirm itself, make war upon the war which institutes it without ever being able to reappropriate this negativity, to the extent that it is discourse. Necessarily without reappropriating it, for if it did so, the horizon of peace would disappear into the night (worst violence as previolence). This secondary war, as the avowal of violence, is the least possible violence, the only way to repress the worst violence, the violence of primitive and prelogical silence, of an unimaginable night which would not even be the opposite of day, an absolute violence which would not even be the opposite of nonviolence: nothingness or pure non-sense. Thus discourse chooses itself violently in opposition to nothingness or pure non-sense, and, in philosophy, against nihilism. For this not to be so, the eschatology which animates Levinas’s discourse would have to have kept its promise already, even to the extent of no longer being able to occur within discourse as eschatology, and as the idea of a peace “beyond history.” The “messianic triumph” “armed against evil’s revenge” would have to have been ushered in. This messianic triumph, which is the horizon of Levinas’s book, but which “overflows its framework” (TI), could abolish violence only by suspending the difference (conjunction or opposition) between the same and the other, that is, by suspending the idea of peace. But here and now (in a present in general), this horizon cannot be stated, an end cannot be stated, eschatology is not possible, except through violence. This infinite passage through violence is what is called history. To overlook the irreducibility of this last violence, is to revert—within the order of philosophical discourse which one cannot seek to reject, except by risking the worst violence—to an infinitist dogmatism in pre-Kantian style, one which does not pose the question of responsibility for its own finite philosophical discourse. It is true that the delegation of this responsibility to God is not an abdication, God

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not being a finite third party: thus conceived, divine responsibility neither excludes nor diminishes the integrity of my own responsibility, the responsibility of the finite philosopher. On the contrary, divine responsibility requires and calls for this latter responsibility, as its telos or its origin. But the fact of the inadequation of these two responsibilities, or of this unique responsibility for itself—this history or anxiety of the infinite—is not yet a theme for the pre-Kantian, or rather even pre-Hegelian, rationalists. Nor will it be so for as long as the absolutely principial self-evidence, in Levinas’s own terms, of “the impossibility for the ego not to be itself ” is not dissolved. The ego cannot not be itself even when it ventures out toward the other, nor could it venture forth with this impossibility, which thus “marks the innate tragedy of the ego, the fact that it is riveted to its own being” (EE), according to Levinas’s strong statement. And above all, marks the fact that the ego knows this. This knowledge is the first discourse and first word of eschatology; it is that which permits separation and speaking to the other. It is not a knowledge among others, but is knowledge itself. “It is this ‘always-beingone-and-yet-always-other’ which is the fundamental characteristic of knowledge, etc.” (Schelling). No philosophy responsible for its language can renounce ipseity in general, and the philosophy or eschatology of separation may do so less than any other. Between original tragedy and messianic triumph there is philosophy, in which violence is returned against violence within knowledge, in which original finitude appears, and in which the other is respected within, and by, the same. This finitude makes its appearance in an irreducibly open question which is the philosophical question in general: why is the essential, irreducible, absolutely general and unconditioned form of experience as a venturing forth toward the other still egoity? Why is an experience which would not be lived as my own (for an ego in general, in the eidetictranscendental sense of these words) impossible and unthinkable? This unthinkable and impossible are the limits of reason in general. In other words: why finitude, if, as Schelling had said, “egoity is the general principle of finitude”? And why Reason, if it is true that “Reason and Egoity, in their true Absoluteness, are one and the same” (Schelling), and true that “reason . . . is a kind of universal and essential structure of transcendental subjectivity in general” (Husserl)? The philosophy which is

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164 writing and difference the discourse of this reason as phenomenology cannot answer such a question by essence, for every answer can be made only in language, and language is opened by the question. Philosophy (in general) can only open itself to the question, within it and by it. It can only let itself be questioned. Husserl knew this. And he called the irreducibly egoic essence of experience “archi-factuality” (Urtatsache), nonempirical factuality, transcendental factuality (a notion to which attention has never been paid, perhaps). “This I am is for me, for the I who says it and understands it accordingly, the primordial intentional foundation of my world (der intentionale Urgrund für meine Welt).”48 My world is the opening in which all experience occurs, including, as the experience par excellence, that which is transcendence toward the Other as such. Nothing can appear outside the appurtenance to “my world” for “I am.” “Whether it is suitable or not, whether it appears to me monstrous (due to whatever prejudices) or not, I must stand firm before the primordial fact (die Urtatsache, der ich standhalten muss), from which I cannot turn my glance for an instant, as a philosopher. For philosophical children this indeed may be the dark corner to which the ghosts of solipsism, or of psychologism or relativism, return. The true philosopher will prefer, instead of fleeing from these ghosts, to illuminate the dark corner.”49 Understood in this sense, the intentional relationship of “ego to my world” cannot be opened on the basis of an infinite-other radically foreign to “my world,” nor can it be imposed upon me by a God who determines this relationship: “The subjective a priori is that which precedes the Being of God and of everything, without exception, which exists for me, a thinking being. God too, is for me what he is by my own conscious production; I cannot look away from this in the anguished fear of what may be considered blasphemy, but on the contrary must see in it the problem. Here too, just as concerning the alter ego, ‘conscious production’ does not mean that I invent and fashion this supreme transcendence.”50 God no more really depends upon me than does the alter-ego. But he has meaning only for an ego in general. Which means that before all atheism or all faith, before all theology, before all language about God or with God, God’s divinity (the infinite alterity of the infinite other, for example) must have a meaning for an ego in general. Let us note in passing that the “subjective a priori” recognized by transcendental

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phenomenology is the only possible way to check the totalitarianism of the neutral, the impersonal “absolute Logic,” that is, eschatology without dialogue and everything classed under the conventional—quite conventional—rubric of Hegelianism. The question about egoity as transcendental archi-factuality can be repeated more profoundly in the direction of the archi-factuality of the “living present.” For egological life has as its irreducible and absolutely universal form the living present. There is no experience which can be lived other than in the present. The absolute impossibility of living other than in the present, this eternal impossibility, defines the unthinkable as the limit of reason. The notion of a past whose meaning could not be thought in the form of a (past) present marks the impossible-unthinkable-unstatable not only for philosophy in general but even for a thought of being which would seek to take a step outside philosophy. This notion, however, does become a theme in the meditation of the trace announced in Levinas’s most recent writings. In the living present, the notion of which is at once the most simple and most difficult of notions, all temporal alterity can be constituted and appear as such: as other past present, other future present, other absolute origins relived in intentional modification, in the unity and actuality of my living present. Only the actual unity of my living present permits other presents (other absolute origins) from appearing as such, in what is called memory or anticipation (for example, but in truth in the constant movement of temporalization). But only the alterity of past and future presents permits the absolute identity of the living present as the self-identity of non-self identity. One would have to show,51 on the basis of the Cartesian Meditations, and given the reduction of every problem of factual genesis, how the question of anteriority in the relation between the constitution of other as other present and the constitution of the other as Others is a false question, which must refer to a common structural root. Although in the Cartesian Meditations Husserl evokes only the analogy of the two movements (Sec. 52), in many of the unpublished works he seems to hold them to be inseparable. In the last analysis, if one wishes to determine violence as the necessity that the other not appear as what it is, that it not be respected except in, for, and by the same, that it be dissimulated by the same in the very freeing of its phenomenon, then time is violence. This

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166 writing and difference movement of freeing absolute alterity in the absolute same is the movement of temporalization in its most absolutely unconditioned universal form: the living present. If the living present, the absolute form of the opening of time to the other in itself, is the absolute form of egological life, and if egoity is the absolute form of experience, then the present, the presence of the present, and the present of presence, are all originally and forever violent. The living present is originally marked by death. Presence as violence is the meaning of finitude, the meaning of meaning as history. But why? Why finitude? Why history?52 And why may we, on what basis may we, examine this violence as finitude and as history? Why the why? And from whence does it permit itself to be understood in its philosophical determination? Levinas’s metaphysics in a sense presupposes—at least we have attempted to show this—the transcendental phenomenology that it seeks to put into question. And yet the legitimacy of this putting into question does not seem to us any less radical. What is the origin of the question about transcendental archi-factuality as violence? Upon what basis does one ask questions about finitude as violence? Upon what basis does the original violence of discourse permit itself to be commanded to be returned against itself, to be always, as language, the return against itself which recognizes the other as other? Of course, one cannot answer these questions (for example, by saying that the question about the violence of finitude can be posed only on the basis of finitude’s other and the idea of infinity), except by undertaking a new discourse which once more will seek to justify transcendental phenomenology. But the naked opening of the question, its silent opening, escapes phenomenology, as the origin and end of phenomenology’s logos. The silent opening of the question about history as finitude and violence permits the appearance of history as such; it is the call (to) (of) an eschatology which dissimulates its own opening, covers this opening with its own noise as soon as the opening stands forth and is determined. This is the opening of a question, in the inversion of transcendental dissymmetry, put to philosophy as logos, finitude, history, violence: an interpellation of the Greek by the non-Greek at the heart of a silence, an ultralogical affect of speech, a question which can be stated only by being forgotten in the language

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of the Greeks; and a question which can be stated, as forgotten, only in the language of the Greeks. The strange dialogue of speech and silence. The strange community of the silent question of which we spoke above. It seems to us that this is the point at which, beyond any misunderstandings about Husserl’s literal ambitions, phenomenology and eschatology can open a dialogue interminably, be opened in it, calling each other to silence. Of ontological violence Silence is a word which is not a word, and breath an object which is not an object. (G. Bataille)

Does not the movement of this dialogue also govern the explication with Heidegger? It would not be surprising. To be persuaded of this, it would suffice to notice, in the most schematic way possible, the following: in order to speak, as we have just spoken, of the present as the absolute form of experience, one already must understand what time is, must understand the ens of the praes-ens, and the proximity of the Being of this ens. The present of presence and the presence of the present suppose the horizon, the precomprehending anticipation of Being as time. If the meaning of Being always has been determined by philosophy as presence, then the question of Being, posed on the basis of the transcendental horizon of time (first stage, in Being and Time) is the first tremor of philosophical security, as it is of self-confident presence. Now, Husserl never unfolded this question of Being. If phenomenology carries this question within itself each time that it considers the themes of temporalization, and of the relationship to the alter ego, it nonetheless remains dominated by a metaphysics of presence. The question of Being does not govern its discourse. Phenomenology in general, as the passageway to essentiality, presupposes an anticipation of the esse of essence, the unity of the esse prior to its distribution into essence and existence. Via another route, one could probably show that Husserl silently presupposes a metaphysical anticipation or decision when, for example, he affirms Being (Sein) as the nonreality (Realität) of the ideal (Ideal). Ideality is unreal, but it is—as

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168 writing and difference object or as thought—being. Without a presupposed access to a meaning of Being not exhausted by reality, the entire Husserlian theory of ideality would collapse, and with it all of transcendental phenomenology. For example, Husserl could no longer write: “Offenbar muss überhaupt jeder Versuch, das Sein des Idealen in ein mögliches Sein von Realem umzudeuten, daran scheitern, dass Möglichkeiten selbst wieder ideale Gegenstände sind. So wenig in der realen Welt Zahlen im allgemeinen, Dreiecke im allgemeinen zu finden sind so wenig Möglichkeiten” (“Manifestly every attempt to reinterpret the Being of the ideal as a possible Being of the real must fail, on the whole, for the possibilities themselves are in turn ideal. In the real world, one finds as few possibilities as one does numbers in general, or triangles in general).”53 The meaning of Being—before each of its regional determinations—must be thought first, if one is to distinguish the ideal which is not only from the real which it is not, but also from the fictional which belongs to the domain of the possible real. (“Naturally, it is not our intention to place the Being of the ideal on the same level as the Being-thought of the fictional or the absurd.”54 Hundreds of analogous texts could be cited.) But if Husserl can write this, and if, therefore, he presupposes access to a meaning of Being in general, how can he distinguish his idealism as a theory of knowledge from metaphysical idealism? The latter too, posited the unreal Being of the ideal. Husserl doubtless would respond, thinking of Plato, that the ideal was realized within metaphysical idealism, that is, that it was substantified, hypostasized, as soon as it was not understood essentially, in each of its aspects, as noema, and as soon as one imagined that it could be without in some way being thought or envisaged. This situation would not have been totally modified later when the eidos became originally and essentially noema only in the Understanding or Logos of an infinite subject: God. But to what extent does transcendental idealism, whose way is opened thereby, escape the horizon—at the very least—of this infinite subjectivity? This cannot be debated here. However, if he had previously opposed Heidegger to Husserl, Levinas now contests what he calls “Heideggerean ontology”: “The primacy of ontology for Heidegger does not rest on the truism, ‘To know the existent it is necessary to have comprehended the Being of the existent.’ To affirm the priority of Being over the existent is to decide

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the essence of philosophy; it is to subordinate the relation with someone, who is an existent, (the ethical relation) to a relation with the Being of the existent, which, impersonal, permits the apprehension, the domination of the existent (a relationship of knowing), subordinates justice to freedom” (TI, p. 45). This ontology would be valid for every existent, “except for the Other.”55 Levinas’s phrase overwhelms “ontology”: not only would the thought of the Being of the existent have the impoverished logic of the truism, but it escapes this poverty only in order to seize and to murder the Other. It is a laughably self-evident but criminal truism, which places ethics under the heel of ontology. Therefore, what of “ontology” and the “truism” (“in order to know the existent it is necessary to have comprehended the Being of the existent”)? Levinas says that “the primacy of ontology does not rest” on a “truism.” Is this certain? If the truism (true, truth) is fidelity to truth (that is, to the Being of what is as what it is, and such as it is), it is not certain that thought (Heidegger, for example) has ever sought to avoid it. “What is strange about this thought of Being is its simplicity,” says Heidegger, at the very moment, moreover, when he demonstrates that this thought entertains no theoretical or practical aims. “The accomplishment of this thought is neither theoretical nor practical; no more does it consist in the union of these two modes of behavior.”56 Is not this gesture of return to what is within the dissociation of theory and practice also Levinas’s gesture?57 Does he not have to define metaphysical transcendence, therefore, as a not (yet) practical ethics? We are concerned here with some rather strange truisms. It is “by the simplicity of its essence” that “the thought of Being makes itself unknowable for us.”58 If, on the contrary, by “truism” one understands, in the realm of judgment, analytic affirmation and the poverty of tautology, then the incriminated proposition is perhaps the least analytic of all; for if there were to be only one thought in the world which escapes the form of the truism, it would be this one. First, what Levinas envisages in the word “truism” is not a judicative proposition but a truth previous to judgment, which in turn founds all possible judgment. A banal truism is the repetition of the subject in the predicate. Now, Being is not simply a predicate of the existent, no more than it is the existent’s

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170 writing and difference subject. If it is taken as essence or as existence (as Being-such or Beingthere), if it is taken as copula or as position of existence, or, more profoundly and more originally, if it is taken as the unitary focal point of all these possibilities, then the Being of the existent does not belong to the realm of predication, because it is already implied in all predication in general, and makes predication possible. And it makes every synthetic or analytic judgment possible. It is beyond genre and categories, transcendental in the scholastic sense, before scholasticism had made of the transcendental a supreme and infinite existent, God himself. It must be a singular truism that, through which is sought, in the most profound way, as the most concrete thought of all thoughts, the common root of essence and existence, without which no judgment, no language would be possible, and which every concept can only presuppose, by dissimulating it.59 But if “ontology” is not a truism, or at least a truism among others, and if the strange difference between Being and the existent has a meaning, or is meaning, can one speak of the “priority” of Being in relation to the existent? An important question, here, for it is this alleged “priority” which, for Levinas, would enslave ethics to “ontology. There can be an order of priority only between two determined things, two existents. Being, since it is nothing outside the existent, a theme which Levinas had commented upon so well previously, could in no way precede the existent, whether in time, or in dignity, etc. Nothing is more clear, as concerns this, in Heidegger’s thought. Henceforth, one cannot legitimately speak of the “subordination” of the existent to Being, or, for example, of the ethical relation to the ontological relation. To precomprehend or explicate the implicit relation of Being to the existent60 is not to submit the existent (for example, someone) to Being in a violent fashion. Being is but the Being-of this existent, and does not exist outside it as a foreign power, or as a hostile or neutral impersonal element. The neutrality so often denounced by Levinas can only be the characteristic of an undetermined existent, of an anonymous ontic power, of a conceptual generality, or of a principle. Now, Being is not a principle, is not a principial existent, an archia which would permit Levinas to insert the face of a faceless tyrant under the name of Being. The thought of Being (of the existent) is radically foreign to the search for a principle, or even for a root (although

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certain images lead us to believe this, occasionally), or for a “tree of knowledge”: it is, as we have seen, beyond theory, and is not the first word of theory. It is even beyond all hierarchies. If every “philosophy,” every “metaphysics,” has always sought to determine the first existent, the excellent and truly existent existent, then the thought of the Being of the existent is not this metaphysics or first philosophy. It is not even ontology (cf. above), if ontology is another name for first philosophy. Since it is not first philosophy concerned with the archi-existent, that is, the first thing or first cause which governs, then the thought of Being is neither concerned with, nor exercises, any power. For power is a relationship between existents. “Such thinking has no result. It produces no effect” (Humanismus). Levinas writes: “Ontology, as first philosophy, is a philosophy of power” (TI). This is perhaps true. But we have just seen that the thought of Being is neither ontology, nor first philosophy, nor a philosophy of power. Foreign to every first philosophy, it is not opposed to any kind of first philosophy. Not even to morals, if, as Levinas says, “morals is not a branch of philosophy but first philosophy” (TI). Foreign to the search for an ontic archia in general, for an ethical or political archia in particular, it is not foreign, in the sense understood by Levinas who accuses it precisely of this foreignness, in the way violence is foreign to nonviolence, or evil to good. One may say of it what Alain said of philosophy: it “is no more politics” (or ethics) . . . than it is agriculture.” Which does not mean that it is an industry. Radically foreign to ethics, it is not a counterethics, nor a subordination of ethics to a function in the realm of ethics that is already secretly violent: the neutral. Levinas always reconstructs, and not only in the case of Heidegger, the polis or kind of social organization whose delicate outline he believes can be traced through a discourse offered neither as sociological, nor as political, nor as ethical. Thus it is paradoxical to see the Heideggerean city governed by a neutral power, by an anonymous discourse, that is, by the “one” (man) whose inauthenticity Heidegger was the first to describe. And if it is true, in a difficult sense, that the Logos, according to Heidegger, “is the Logos of no one,” this certainly does not mean that it is the anonymity of oppression, the impersonality of the State, or the neutrality of the “one says.” It is anonymous only as the possibility of the name and of responsibility. “But if man must one day arrive in the neighborhood of

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172 writing and difference Being, he must first learn to exist in that which has no name” (Humanism). Did not the Kabbala also speak of the unnameable possibility of the Name? The thought of Being, therefore, can have no human design, secret or not. Taken by itself, it is doubtless the only thought which no anthropology, no ethics, and above all, no ethico-anthropological psychoanalysis will ever enclose.61 Quite the contrary. Not only is the thought of Being not ethical violence, but it seems that no ethics—in Levinas’s sense—can be opened without it. Thought—or at least the precomprehension of Being—conditions (in its own fashion, which excludes every ontic conditionality: principles, causes, premises, etc.) the recognition of the essence of the existent (for example someone, existent as other, as other self, etc.). It conditions the respect for the other as what it is: other. Without this acknowledgment, which is not a knowledge, or let us say without this “letting-be” of an existent (Other) as something existing outside me in the essence of what it is (first in its alterity), no ethics would be possible. “To let be” is an expression of Heidegger’s which does not mean, as Levinas seems to think,62 to let be as an “object of comprehension first,” and, in the case of the Other, as “interlocutor afterward.” The “letting-be” concerns all possible forms of the existent, and even those which, by essence, cannot be transformed into “objects of comprehension.”63 If it belongs to the essence of the Other first and foremost to be an “interlocutor” and to be “interpellated,” then the “letting-be” will let the Other be what it is, will respect it as interpellated-interlocutor. The “letting-be” does not only, or by privilege, concern impersonal things. To let the other be in its existence and essence as other means that what gains access to thought, or (and) what thought gains access to, is that which is essence and that which is existence; and that which is the Being which they both presuppose. Without this, no letting-be would be possible, and first of all, the letting be of respect and of the ethical commandment addressing itself to freedom. Violence would reign to such a degree that it would no longer even be able to appear and be named. Therefore, the “relation to the Being of the existent”